Abstract
Human skins are active, smart, and stretchable. Artificial skins that can replicate these properties are promising materials and technologies that will enable lightweight, cost-effective, portable, and deployable soft devices and robots. We show an active, stretchable, and portable artificial skin (ElectroSkin) that combines dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) and soft electroadhesives (EAs) in a fully compliant multilayer composite skin-like structure. By taking advantage of the common characteristics of DEA and EA, we define regions of the composite artificial skin as either active or passive. Active areas can be exploited as electromechanical actuators or as electrostatic gripper elements, or both simultaneously. This embedded multimodality delivers a new technology of deformable active skins that can grip and move objects and self-locomote. ElectroSkins can be fabricated using all-soft elastomers and readily available conductive materials. We demonstrate their capabilities in the first soft self-actuating conveyor belt, with a conveyoring speed of 0.28 mm/s, and a pocketable fully soft crawler robot. This new, self-actuating, self-gripping, and self-locomoting soft artificial skin has the potential to significantly impact on functional soft-smart composites, deployable robots, soft-smart conveyoring, and compliant gripping and manipulation applications.
Highlights
Pocketable and deployable devices, fabricated from intrinsically robust and compliant soft-smart materials and structures, that can self-locomote and move objects will deliver important new capabilities
Stretchable, and portable artificial skin (ElectroSkin) that combines dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) and soft electroadhesives (EAs) in a fully compliant multilayer composite skin-like structure
We present an approach to all-soft robots by exploiting the common characteristics and materials of two emerging actuation technologies
Summary
Pocketable and deployable devices, fabricated from intrinsically robust and compliant soft-smart materials and structures, that can self-locomote and move objects will deliver important new capabilities. For the 4:2 (4-electrode, 2-unit) ElectroSkin conveyor belt design, two DEAs with the same electrode width and length were used (Fig. 5C).
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