Towards the first developments of self-healing soft robotics

With upcoming new synthetic materials, the importance of polymers in the robotic industry is increasing and smart materials are even exploited, such as shape memory and piezoelectric polymers used in new actuation mechanisms. However, the self-healing material technology has barely made its entrance in the robotics, where self-healing is only known on the software level. This research aims at introducing self-healing polymers in soft robotics. Soft robots are made almost entirely out of flexible, soft elastomers, making them suitable for
applications in uncertain, dynamic task-environments, including safe human-robot interactions. Because of their intrinsic compliance they are resistant to shocks and high mechanical impacts. But being soft, they are very susceptible to damages caused by sharp objects, eg. glass corners, pointy items, etc. We propose to fabricate the flexible membranes of soft robots out of thermos-reversible covalent Diels-Alder (DA) elastomers. Macroscopic damages can be healed, using a heat treatment.