Fabrication strategy for micro soft robotics with semiconductor devices integration

Abstract

We report a general method to fabricate miniaturized soft robots. For the first time, a freestanding microscale robotic finger/tentacle has been realized by heterogeneous integration of soft material polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), liquid metal (LM), and silicon chips. Unlike the existing methods to make soft electronics or soft robotics, our technique of heterogeneous integration enables large-area parallel manufacturing of micro soft robotics armed with distributed crystalline silicon, deformable microfluidic channels, and flexible electrical interconnections, bridging the gap between the state-of-the-art soft electronics on a continuous film and soft robotics spanned in centimeters.