All posts tagged: soft robotics

Reprogrammable artificial muscle can change its shape, recover from damage, and even be reused

Reprogrammable artificial muscle can change its shape, recover from damage, and even be reused

Published by Jenni Sidey

Soft robots have long promised something rigid machines cannot easily deliver. They offer the ability to bend, flex, and handle the messy unpredictability of the real world. However, there has been a catch. Once many artificial muscles are built, they are stuck with the motions they were designed to make. A research team in South Korea says it has found a way around that problem. They created an artificial muscle that can be reshaped during use, recover after damage, and even have part of its material reused in another device. This advance could push soft robotics closer to systems that behave less like disposable tools. Furthermore, the systems may become more like adaptable machines. The work came from a joint team led by Prof. Jeong-Yun Sun of Seoul National University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Prof. Ho-Young Kim of the university’s Department of Mechanical Engineering also led the team. The study appears in Science Advances. Yun Hyeok Lee, Seungwon Moon, and Min-gyu Lee served as first and co-first authors. Schematic of an rDEA and …

Programmable hydrogel ‘smart skin’ can hide images, shift texture, and morph shape

Programmable hydrogel ‘smart skin’ can hide images, shift texture, and morph shape

Published by Jenni Sidey

At first glance, it looks like a plain, slightly glossy sheet. Then it goes through a quick bath, the temperature shifts, and a famous face comes back from nowhere. In one demonstration, a film made from hydrogel, a water-rich material that feels a bit like soft contact lens plastic, suddenly brought the Mona Lisa into view. The image was not printed with ink. It was encoded into the material itself, and it stayed invisible until the right conditions flipped the switch. That trick is part of a broader effort at Penn State to make what the researchers call a programmable “smart synthetic skin,” a thin, shape-shifting material that can be tuned to change its appearance, texture, and mechanical behavior when exposed to outside triggers like heat, solvents, or physical stress. Hongtao Sun, an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Penn State and the project’s principal investigator, said the concept was inspired by cephalopods, including octopuses, which can control the look and feel of their skin to blend in or signal to each other. …