SHERO: Self-healing Soft Robotics

Abstract

Soft robotic systems benefit from improved compliance and larger degrees of freedom, allowing more complex motions and safer interaction with their environment than rigid robotic structures. Due to the inherent softness of the materials that are often used to create such soft robotic structures, these systems are highly susceptible to various damage modes, such as cuts or punctures by sharp objects, overloading during actuation, flaws originating from manufacturing process or fatigue failure, drastically limiting their service lifetimes. Various types of synthetic materials that possess the ability to repair damage are being used to create soft robotic systems that are able to recover their performance by repairing incurred damage, either autonomously or after the application of a stimulus. The breakthrough targeted in the SHERO project is the development of complete robotic systems that are able to (1) sense and locate damage and to evaluate the system performance, (2) react intelligently to alleviate the damaging event and prevent catastrophic failure, (3) take the necessary measures to heal the damage to restore all functions by facilitating an autonomous or controlled healing action of the damaged element, and (4) perform a rehabilitation by evaluating the quality of the healing process and the recovery of functional performance, and finally, (5) return to action.