Biomimetic chameleon soft robot with artificial crypsis and disruptive coloration skin

Abstract

Development of an artificial camouflage at a complete device level remains a vastly challenging task, especially under the aim of achieving more advanced and natural camouflage characteristics via high-resolution camouflage patterns. Our strategy is to integrate a thermochromic liquid crystal layer with the vertically stacked, patterned silver nanowire heaters in a multilayer structure to overcome the limitations of the conventional lateral pixelated scheme through the superposition of the heater-induced temperature profiles. At the same time, the weaknesses of thermochromic camouflage schemes are resolved in this study by utilizing the temperature-dependent resistance of the silver nanowire network as the process variable of the active control system. Combined with the active control system and sensing units, the complete device chameleon model successfully retrieves the local background color and matches its surface color instantaneously with natural transition characteristics to be a competent option for a next-generation artificial camouflage.