Soft-robots snap into action with thermal actuators
A new design for thermal actuators can be used to create rapid movement in soft robotic devices, claim researchers at North Carolina State University.
Thermally actuated soft robots are not new, but they have been relatively slow. “We’ve made them fast,” said Yong Zhu, corresponding author a paper detailing the work in Soft Robotics. Zhu is also the Andrew A. Adams Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NC State.
“What makes this new actuator design work is a structure with a bi-stable design,” said Shuang Wu, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State. “Think of a snap hair clip. It’s stable until you apply a certain amount of energy [by bending it over], and then it snaps into a different shape – which is also stable.”
New technique prints silver nanowires that stretch and flex
To make the material, the researchers layered two materials on top of each other, with silver nanowires in the middle. The two materials have different coefficients of thermal expansion, so they expand at different rates as they heat up.
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