Engineers from the University of California, San Diego have developed a way to create compact, portable, and feature-rich soft robots. This was made possible thanks to the creation of tubular drives, the movements of which are controlled by electric current, which makes them easily integrated into various devices.

An article about this appeared in the journal Science Advances.

The problem with most soft drives is that bulky devices are required to control them. Such devices are often hydraulic - in order to set their mechanism in motion, it is necessary to pump or pump air from the tubes. Therefore, the creation of robots with these types of drives will require binding to pumps, large power supplies and other specialized equipment.

In a new study, engineers at the University of California at San Diego created soft drives that are controlled by electric current. The devices are made of material that is used to produce artificial muscles in robots - a liquid crystal elastomer. Its peculiarity is that it changes shape, moves and contracts in response to stimuli such as heat or electricity, just as muscles contract in response to signals from nerve cells.

To build each drive, engineers clamped three heating wires between two thin films of a liquid crystal elastomer. Then the material was rolled into a tube, pre-stretched and exposed to ultraviolet light.

Each heating wire can be controlled independently so that the drives can be bent in six different directions. When an electric current passes through one or two wires, it heats a portion of the tube and causes it to bend in the direction of these drives. When current is transmitted through all three wires, the entire tube is compressed, shortening in length. When the electricity is turned off, the tube cools down slowly and returns to its original shape.

The combination of several drives together allowed engineers to create various types of soft robots. They built a walking robot using four drives as legs. It is powered by a small built-in lithium polymer battery. Scientists have also created a soft grip mechanism using three drives as “fingers”.

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