A New Strategy of Discretionarily Reconfigurable Actuators Based on Self-Healing Elastomers for Diverse Soft Robots |
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Authors: | Jiaming Lou Zenghe Liu Lei Yang Yifan Guo Dong Lei Zhengwei You |
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Institution: | State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, Shanghai Belt and Road Joint Laboratory of Advanced Fiber and Low-dimension Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620 P. R. China |
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Abstract: | Actuators have shown great promise in many fields including soft robotics. Since reconfiguration allows actuators to change their actuation mode, it is considered a key characteristic for new-generation adaptive actuators. However, it remains a challenge to design simple and universal methods to fabricate actuators that can be reconfigured to allow diverse actuation modes. Here, a macroscopically discretionary healing-assembly strategy to fabricate reconfigurable soft actuators based on intrinsic self-healing poly(dimethylglyoxime-urethane) (PDOU) elastomers is developed. The PDOU elastomers with different degrees of crosslinking show different responsiveness to solvents, and are seamlessly healed. Crosslinked and non-crosslinked PDOU elastomers as building units are healing-assembled into actuators/robots with diverse actuation behaviors. Notably, the assembled actuators/robots are readily reprogrammed to exhibit multiple actuation modes by simply tailoring and reassembling without any external stimuli. This work paves a new, simple, powerful, and universal method to construct sophisticated soft robots. |
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Keywords: | actuators reconfiguration self-healing soft robots |
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