Why do these kept getting made? I feel like I see some new soft robot every few months or so. Are they used to infiltrate past grates in a sewer security system and slide under lasers or something what is up with these???
Liquid crystal elastomers will most likely never be used in humans because, in order to drive the phase transition (mematic mesogens going from isotopic to anisotropic phase) necessary for macro scale work, the LCE has to be heated well beyond 100C. Even in non-thermal contexts, you need kilovolts to influence a doped bulk LCE. I just don't see it happening.
These phase transition motive architectures all suffer from the same issues of not enough precision with repeatable positioning, very low speed, and limited control over the shaping of force/torque curve.
I don’t know much at all about materials - but wouldn’t this be a little “fuzzy”? If they’re using heat to expand/contract whatever material, I imagine there’s a degree of variance with the starting state / ending state - depending on the environment the “soft robot” is in.
A static amount of electricity may only be able to move the wings so much in a cold environment, right?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] threadIt's a pretty cool concept and might have interesting albeit niche applications.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@soiboisoft
The only practical example are wax motors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motor
This entire article is simply bad university lab PR.
A static amount of electricity may only be able to move the wings so much in a cold environment, right?