Leveraging Bioinspired Structural Constraints for Tunable and Programmable Snapping Dynamics in High‐Speed Soft Actuators

• DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202209798
• Publication Date: 2022-11-11T08:22:35Z
• Authors: Jiao Wang; Tonghui Zhao; Yangyang Fan; Huimin Wu; Jiu‐an Lv
• Keywords: Soft Robotics

Abstract Creating high‐speed soft actuators will have broad engineering and technological applications. Snapping provides a power‐amplified mechanism to achieve rapid movements in that typically show slow movements. However, precise control of snapping dynamics (e.g., speed direction launching or jumping) remains daunting challenge. Here, bioinspired design principle is presented harnesses reconfigurable constraint structure integrated into photoactive liquid crystal elastomer actuator enable tunable programmable over its dynamics. By reconfiguring constrained fin‐array‐shaped structure, the structured actuator, such as jumping angle height, motion speed, release force can be on‐demand tuned, thus enabling controllable catapult jumping. Moreover, exhibit unique combination ultrafast moving (up 2.5 m s −1 0.22 jumping), powerful ejection (long distance ≈20 cm, 35 mg ball), high height (≈8 40 times body lengths), which few other achieve. This study new universal paradigm for realizing high‐power motions matter, are useful building high‐performance robotics actuation devices.