Hemispherical Cell-Inspired Soft Actuator

Kahye Song; Youngsu Cha

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2020.00020

Hemispherical Cell-Inspired Soft Actuator

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2020 Feb 19:8:20. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2020.00020. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Kahye Song^{1

2

3}, Youngsu Cha¹

Affiliations

¹ Center for Intelligent & Interactive Robotics, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea.
² John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States.
³ Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States.

Abstract

As soft robots have been popular, interest in soft actuators is also increasing. In particular, new types of actuators have been proposed through biomimetics. An actuator that we proposed in this study was inspired by a motor cell that enables plants to move. This actuator is an electrostatic actuator utilizing electrostatic attraction and elastic force, and can be used repeatedly. In addition, this actuator, which can produce large and diverse movements by collecting individual movements like a cell, has a wide application field. As one of them, this actuator is stacked to construct a layer structure and propose an application example. In addition, a piezo sensor was built inside the actuator and real-time motion monitoring was attempted. As a result, the point laser sensor value and the piezo sensor value coincided with each other, which means that it is possible to detect motion in real-time with the built-in sensor.

Keywords: bio-mimicry; electrostatic actuator; layer actuator; sensor embedded actuator; soft actuator.