Leveraging Bioinspired Structural Constraints for Tunable and Programmable Snapping Dynamics in High-Speed Soft Actuators

Creating high-speed soft actuators will have broad engineering and technological applications. Snapping provides a power-amplified mechanism to achieve rapid movements in soft actuators that typically show slow movements. However, precise control of snapping dynamics (e.g., speed and direction of launching or jumping) remains a daunting challenge. Here, a bioinspired design principle is presented that harnesses a reconfigurable constraint structure integrated into a photoactive liquid crystal elastomer actuator to enable tunable and programmable control over its snapping dynamics. By reconfiguring constrained fin-array-shaped structure, the snapping dynamics of the structured actuator, such as launching or jumping angle and height, motion speed, and release force can be on-demand tuned, thus enabling controllable catapult motion and programmable jumping. Moreover, the structured actuators exhibit a unique combination of ultrafast moving speed (up to 2.5 m s^?1 in launching and 0.22 m s^?1 in jumping), powerful ejection (long ejection distance of ≈20 cm, 35 mg ball), and high jumping height (≈8 cm, 40 times body lengths), which few other soft actuators can achieve. This study provides a new universal design paradigm for realizing controllable rapid movements and high-power motions in soft matter, which are useful for building high-performance soft robotics and actuation devices.