Soft Functional Materials for the Next Generation of Robots

Robotics is in the process of revolutionizing our lives. In factories robots already execute repetitive tasks at an unmatched speed and precision, but they will surely leave the factory floor in the near future to support us for various additional tasks. Robots will collaborate with humans in situations that are too dangerous or physically demanding and humans will wear robotic systems on their bodies to enhance their physical capabilities or to restore function after injury. Realizing this vision requires the development of new types of robots, which are safer around humans and adaptable to changing, unpredictable environments. Over the last decade, materials scientists have demonstrated that such robots can be realized by constructing them from soft materials instead of traditional hard materials such as metals. However, these so-called functional soft materials are still rarely found in real-world robotic systems today.

In a Comment for Nature Materials entitled “Shaping the future of robotics through materials innovation” Philipp Rothemund, Postdoc in the Robotic Materials Department, and Christoph Keplinger, Director of the Robotic Materials Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, discuss together with collaborators from Cornell University and MIT issues that currently stand in the way of a wide-spread use of functional soft materials in real-world robotic systems.

Many functional soft materials promise to provide a clear benefit for robotics, but often perform much below their full potential. “Materials scientists must go far beyond proof-of-principle demonstrations and do the tedious work of improving the performance of functional soft materials, if they want their materials to be of interest for commercial robotic systems” says Philipp Rothemund, first author of the Comment. “Functional soft materials respond to various different physical input signals, such as light or temperature, and they need to interact in entirely new ways with each other and the remaining robotic components, whereas for traditional robotic systems all these interfaces are already standardized and common” adds Christoph Keplinger, “we must therefore develop new types of effective and robust interfaces for these functional soft materials to integrate individual components into high-performance robotic systems.”

At the core of these issues lie exciting fundamental and applied research questions whose solution will require collaborations of researchers from different disciplines. Considering the wide potential of functional soft materials, materials scientists hold the key to shaping the future of robotics.

Paper:

Rothemund P., Kim. Y., Heisser R. H., Zhao X., Shepherd R. F., Keplinger C. Shaping the future of robotics through materials innovation. Nature Materials 20, 1582-1587 (2021)

DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-01158-1

Link to Nature Materials:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01158-1

Link for free access to paper:

https://rdcu.be/cBTfS