A Soft Electronics-Free robot
This work addresses the problem of limited softness in robotics for applications requiring biomimetic and flexible designs, representing a foundational advancement rather than an incremental improvement.
The researchers tackled the challenge of creating a fully soft robot without any conventional stiff electronics by developing the first entirely soft robot using dielectric elastomers and an integrated artificial nervous system, which autonomously generates signals from a single DC voltage to achieve crawling locomotion.
Biomimetic entirely soft robots with animal-like behavior and integrated artificial nervous systems will open up totally new perspectives and applications. However, until now all presented studies on soft robots were limited to partly soft designs, since all designs at least needed conventional, stiff, electronics, to sense, process signals and activate actuators. We present the first soft robot with integrated artificial nervous system entirely made of dielectric elastomers - and without any conventional stiff electronic parts. Supplied with only one external DC voltage, the robot autonomously generates all signals necessary to drive its actuators, and translates an in-plane electromechanical oscillation into a crawling locomotion movement. Thereby, all functional parts are made of polymer materials and carbon. Besides the basic design of the world's first entirely soft robot we present prospects to control general behavior of such robots.