Soft Pneumatic Gelatin Actuator for Edible Robotics
This addresses the need for edible components in robotics, potentially enabling new applications like ingestible medical devices or food-based robots, though it is incremental as it builds on existing pneumatic actuator designs.
The researchers developed a fully edible pneumatic actuator using a gelatin-glycerol composite, achieving a bending angle of 170.3° and a blocked force of 0.34 N at 25 kPa pressure, comparable to non-edible elastomer actuators.
We present a fully edible pneumatic actuator based on gelatin-glycerol composite. The actuator is monolithic, fabricated via a molding process, and measures 90 mm in length, 20 mm in width, and 17 mm in thickness. Thanks to the composite mechanical characteristics similar to those of silicone elastomers, the actuator exhibits a bending angle of 170.3 ° and a blocked force of 0.34 N at the applied pressure of 25 kPa. These values are comparable to elastomer based pneumatic actuators. As a validation example, two actuators are integrated to form a gripper capable of handling various objects, highlighting the high performance and applicability of the edible actuator. These edible actuators, combined with other recent edible materials and electronics, could lay the foundation for a new type of edible robots.