Self-healing soft robotics

Activity: Talk or presentationTalk or presentation at a conference

Description

Self-healing polymers have matured in the past decade. While still many fundamental developments are made towards new healing chemistries and mechanisms and further insights are generated for more established systems, much research effort is being devoted to lifting self-healing polymers to higher levels of applicability. Self-healing mechanisms are combined with other functional properties in complex polymeric systems and compromises made in view of achieving the property requirements for many different application fields. Soft robotics is such a field that spurs the innovation of functional materials to reach the high requirements and provides an excellent platform for the demonstration and valorisation of such novel, smart materials. Self-healing materials are disrupting this novel subfield of robotics engineering, as this recent class of smart materials extends the service lifetime of soft robotic actuators by enabling the (autonomous) healing of incurred damage, which otherwise renders these actuators incapable of continuing their task performance. The inherent softness of the materials used to create these soft robots leaves them susceptible to damage from sharp objects in their environment and by overloading during their actuation. Synergistic developments of material scientists and robotics engineers have demonstrated (1) autonomous healing of fatal damage and recovery of actuation performance, (2) strain and damage sensing and localisation, (3) smart actuation control and (4) intelligent structural health monitoring in various types of (soft) robotic systems. Moreover, integrated sensors, electronics and other intelligent systems have been demonstrated to heal damage and recover their functional performance.
Period22 Jun 2022
Event titleInternational Conference on Self-Healing Materials 2022
Event typeConference
LocationMilan, Italy
Degree of RecognitionInternational