Biodegradable artificial muscles are invented
Robotic grippers for garbage collection. Photo credit: Beijing, March 23 (Xinhua) -- A joint team from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, Johannes Kepler University in Austria and the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States have collaborated on a design based on gelatin, oil and bioplastic with a focus on the sustainability of soft robots The material is a fully biodegradable high-performance artificial muscle. The paper was published in Science Advances on Tuesday.
The team demonstrated the potential of the biodegradable technology by disposing of the artificial muscle in a municipal compost bin at the end of its useful life and fully biodegrading within six months.
The researchers say there is an urgent need for sustainable materials in the accelerating field of soft robotics, especially for single-use applications such as medical surgery, search-and-rescue missions and hazardous material handling. Robots of the future will not pile up in landfills at the end of a product's life, but instead become compost for plant growth.
The research team this time built an electric artificial muscle called HASEL. Like a plastic bag filled with oil, HASEL is partially covered by a pair of electrodes, which are made to contract by applying a high voltage to them, just like a real muscle. The key requirement for the deformation of the HASEL is that both the plastic bag and the oil are electrical insulators that can withstand the high electrical stresses generated by the charged electrodes.
Studies have shown that HASEL made from a particular combination of materials is even able to withstand 100,000 drive cycles at thousands of volts without signs of electrical failure or loss of performance. According to the
team, this demonstration of the excellent performance of the new material system means that biodegradable materials will be considered as a viable option for building robots, and hopefully inspire other materials scientists to create new materials with optimized electrical properties.
The research is an important step towards a paradigm shift in soft robotics. Building artificial muscles using biodegradable materials could pave the way for future robotics as green technologies become more widely available.