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RESPONSIVE POLYMERS

Popping, locking robots

Nature Materials volume 20, pages 1590–1591 (2021)Cite this article

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An interplay between deswelling and buckling in a polymer gel is harnessed to achieve sequential snap events for repeatable jumping motion, opening the door to autonomously moving soft robots.

We are on the verge of an engineering paradigm shift where we will find ourselves no longer fully understanding — and thus exercising complete control over — the behaviour of the systems that we are developing. We see this transition not only in the field of electrical engineering and computer science, through concepts such as artificial intelligence, but also in materials science where the combination between chemistry and mechanics enables so-called embodied intelligence. The development of responsive materials that can interact with and harvest their environment is an essential step towards the development of devices and robots with autonomous functionality. Yet, we have not reached the point where we can truly talk about autonomous behaviour, rather, we still need to find innovative ways to implement actuation, sensing and feedback in such materials to further our understanding. Now, writing in Nature Materials, Kim and colleagues introduce polymer gel discs that harness a mechanical buckling instability to transform a slow deswelling process into a sudden and repeating snapping and jumping motion1. It is an elegant experiment that demonstrates how material chemistry and geometry can interact to enable useful and embodied behaviour.

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Fig. 1: Deswelling of a strip of silicone rubber.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Autonomous Matter Department, AMOLF, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Johannes T. B. Overvelde

  2. Institute for Complex Molecular Systems and Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands

    Johannes T. B. Overvelde

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  1. Johannes T. B. Overvelde
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Correspondence to Johannes T. B. Overvelde.

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Overvelde, J.T.B. Popping, locking robots. Nat. Mater. 20, 1590–1591 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01157-2

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