A Soft Electronics-Free robot

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first fully soft robot with an integrated artificial nervous system made entirely of dielectric elastomers, capable of autonomous crawling without stiff electronics, opening new possibilities for biomimetic soft robotics.

Contribution

It presents the design and demonstration of the first entirely soft robot with an integrated artificial nervous system made solely of polymer materials and carbon, eliminating the need for stiff electronics.

Findings

Robot autonomously generates signals for actuation

Achieves crawling locomotion with dielectric elastomers

Operates solely with external DC voltage

Abstract

Biomimetic entirely soft robots with animal-like behavior and integrated artificial nervous systems will open up totally new perspectives and applications. However, until now all presented studies on soft robots were limited to partly soft designs, since all designs at least needed conventional, stiff, electronics, to sense, process signals and activate actuators. We present the first soft robot with integrated artificial nervous system entirely made of dielectric elastomers - and without any conventional stiff electronic parts. Supplied with only one external DC voltage, the robot autonomously generates all signals necessary to drive its actuators, and translates an in-plane electromechanical oscillation into a crawling locomotion movement. Thereby, all functional parts are made of polymer materials and carbon. Besides the basic design of the world's first entirely soft robot we present prospects to control general behavior of such robots.