Gilbert Hausmann Award 2017 – Jun Shintake

"For the design, prototyping, and characterisation of artificial muscles, which represent a milestone achievement in the growing field of soft robotics, including items such as soft manipulators, robust drones, and underwater robots."

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are a very promising soft actuator technology for robotics. The goal of this thesis is to enable novel functionalities—folding, variable stiffness, and adhesion— by developing diverse DEA configurations, and exploiting their elasto-electromechanical couplings to create functionalized robots.

First, we developed a foldable actuator with an antagonistic architecture, allowing bidirectional actuation and passive folding. Two of these actuators were integrated in a fixed-wing drone as ailerons. During flight, the actuators well controlled the drone’s movement, demonstrating their ready applicability to existing robotic systems. Next, we developed a variable stiffness actuator consisting of a DEA bonded on a low-melting-point alloy embedded silicone substrate. The stiffness change of the actuator (90 ×) enabled a two-finger gripper to pick up an 10 g object with an actuated grasping force, two orders of magnitude smaller. Finally, we developed an electro-adhesion actuator with a DEA design simultaneously generating electro-adhesion and electrostatic actuation. We fabricated a two-finger soft gripper (1.5 g) which was capable of lifting objects as high as 60 × its own weight. It also exhibited unprecedented versatility in the variety of items it could lift – ranging from a flat piece of paper to a raw chicken egg to a highly-deformable water balloon.