AIMC Topic: Elastomers

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Tunable Soft Lens of Large Focal Length Change.

Soft robotics
Tunable lens technology inspired by the human eye has opened a new paradigm of smart optical devices for a variety of applications due to unique characteristics such as lightweight, low cost, and facile fabrication over conventional lens assemblies. ...

A Soft Resistive Sensor with a Semicircular Cross-Sectional Channel for Soft Cardiac Catheter Ablation.

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
The field of soft robotics has attracted the interest of the medical community due to the ability of soft elastic materials to traverse the abnormal environment of the human body. However, sensing in soft robotics has been challenging due to the sens...

Body Temperature-Triggered Mechanical Instabilities for High-Speed Soft Robots.

Soft robotics
Nature offers bionic inspirations for elegant applications of mechanical principles such as the concept of snap buckling, which occurs in several plants. Exploiting mechanical instabilities is the key to fast movement here. We use the snap-through an...

An Untethered Soft Robot Based on Liquid Crystal Elastomers.

Soft robotics
An untethered, soft robot using liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) actuators, onboard power, and wireless Bluetooth control was developed. LCE actuators were thermally triggered using Joule heating and demonstrated an ∼5 N force pull capacity per LCE. A ...

An Electrically Actuated Soft Artificial Muscle Based on a High-Performance Flexible Electrothermal Film and Liquid-Crystal Elastomer.

ACS applied materials & interfaces
Liquid-crystal elastomer (LCE)-based soft robots and devices via an electrothermal effect under a low driving voltage have attracted a great deal of attention for their ability on generating larger stress, reversible deformation, and versatile actuat...

Electrically Activated Soft Robots: Speed Up by Rolling.

Soft robotics
Soft robots show excellent body compliance, adaptability, and mobility when coping with unstructured environments and human-robot interactions. However, the moving speed for soft locomotion robots is far from that of their rigid partners. Rolling loc...

Performance Enhancement of Soft Nanotextured Thermopneumatic Actuator by Incorporating Silver Nanowires into Elastomer Body.

Soft robotics
To improve performance of thermopneumatic soft actuators, which have recently been developed for various industrial applications, we embedded different nanoscale materials into their elastomer bodies. This yields a significant enhancement in the actu...

Beyond Human Hand: Shape-Adaptive and Reversible Magnetorheological Elastomer-Based Robot Gripper Skin.

ACS applied materials & interfaces
Developing a simple and universal solution for gripping fragile, multiscaled, and arbitrary-shaped objects using a robot gripper is challenging. Herein, we propose a universal, shape-adaptive/-retaining and reversible, hardness-variable gripper skin ...

Plasma-Induced Polymerizations: A New Synthetic Entry in Liquid Crystal Elastomer Actuators.

Macromolecular rapid communications
The research on soft actuators including liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) becomes more and more appealing at a time when the expansion of artificial systems is blooming. Among the various LCE actuators, the bending deformation is often in the origin ...

Global Vision-Based Formation Control of Soft Robotic Fish Swarm.

Soft robotics
Possessing the attributes of high adaptability and low cost, soft robotic individuals can further coordinate and form into a swarming system, enhancing the performances as well as functions in practical applications. However, the formation control of...