Phototactic Miniature Soft Robots with Terrain Adaptability

Abstract

(11 of 12)www.advmattechnol.de laser source with a wavelength of 808 nm and tunable power output was employed. Laser intenstiy was measured by a power meter (CNI, HS1+TP100). The photographs and videos of the NIR-light-driven experiments were recorded by a super-resolution digital microscope (Keyence, VHX-6000) and digital camera (Canon EOS 80D). The videos of rolling process were recorded by a high-speed microscope VW-9000 at 250.0 fps and analyzed by the software-tracker, a video analysis and modeling tool that enables to trace rolling trajectory.

Self‐Sustained Snapping Drives Autonomous Dancing and Motion in Free‐Standing Wavy Rings

“…Among different soft active materials, anisotropic smart materials such as liquid‐crystal polymers (LCPs) [ 24–26 ] have recently attracted growing interest in untethered actuation and motion [ 27–30 ] due to their two‐way shape memory effects. LCPs can reversibly shrink or elongate by shifting between the nematic and the isotropic states in response to thermal, photo‐, or chemical stimulations.…”

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Snapping has enabled diverse unique functionalities, including amplified force and fast response, [15] high-speed motion (crawling, [16] swimming, [16,17] and jumping [18][19][20][21] ), physical intelligence, [22] and mechanical memory operation. [23] Among different soft active materials, anisotropic smart materials such as liquidcrystal polymers (LCPs) [24][25][26] have recently attracted growing interest in untethered actuation and motion [27][28][29][30] due to their two-way shape memory effects. LCPs can reversibly shrink or elongate by shifting between the nematic and the isotropic states in response to thermal, photo-, or chemical stimulations.

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Controlled Diels–Alder “Click” Strategy to Access Mechanically Aligned Main‐Chain Liquid Crystal Networks

“…To control material properties, liquid crystals can be incorporated into soft polymeric materials to form liquid crystal networks (LCNs). The use of these materials has gained interest for the promising applications ranging from soft and bio‐compatible robotics [1,2] to mechano‐, [3,4] thermo‐, [5] photo‐responsive, [6] self‐healing [7] and smart materials [8] . To translate external stimuli into the most efficient macromolecular responses, liquid crystalline systems should be aligned into a singular domain to maximize the reversible order‐disorder transition that drives a conformational change of the polymer chains [9] …”

Bioinspired helical-artificial fibrous muscle structured tubular soft actuators

“…However, synthetic tubular actuators using soft active materials (SAMs) largely only exhibit few simple deformations (linear contraction/expansion) with limited and undesignable degrees of freedom (DOFs), arising from their spatially monotonic molecular orientation, material, mechanics, and actuation. In recent years, there has been growing interest to leverage liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) to devise smart active devices (e.g., actuators and pumps) in the scientific community ( 5 , 6 ) because these appealing SAMs can not only provide large-scale, reversible deformations but also impressively enable encoding “morphing instructions” into their own materials and architectures via patterning LC alignments and thus allow for the creation of compact, programmable, small-scale morphing devices/robots, which would offer potential technological applications extremely difficult to address with rigid systems that need many auxiliary components (tether, values, etc.) ( 7 ).…”