Untethered Soft Robots with Bioinspired Bone-and-Flesh Constructs for Fast Deterministic Actuation

Abstract

We present a new class of soft robots inspired by the bone-and-flesh construct in human body for fast, deterministic actuation. Two distinctive advancements have been achieved: (1) untethered robots with external magnetic power, boasting high normalized power density of ~2*10-2/s (40-6,000,000× higher than most reports); (2) ultrafast and deterministic-shape actuation in ~0.1 seconds (100x faster than the state-of-the-art). Inspired by the natural human architecture, our soft robots with different elastomer ("flesh") structures and magnet ("bone") placements can complete various tasks quickly and precisely (e.g., planar contraction, out-of-plane gesture transitions, breaking lock-in states, and manipulating small objects). We envision that our design and operation principles can be potentially extended to even more complex applications.