3D printing for gel robotics

Abstract

Yamagata University established the Soft-Matter Robotics Consortium (SOFUMO) to study the extreme parts of robots and to construct epoch-making soft robots using such extreme parts. As a part of such effort, we study a gel piezoelectric sensor and construct a jellyfish-like robot using gel materials such as ion gel, composed of polymer network and ionic liquid, and shape memory gel. We revealed that the ion gel is more appropriate for pressure sensor that particle-doublenetwork hydrogel since impedance of ion gel is changed by application of load weights. In addition, the jellyfish-like robot was constructed using hydrogel and shrinkable wire using electric power. These techniques are expected to be applied to epoch-making soft-matter robots.