Using solar energy into its own energy.
Hefei University of Technology has successfully developed a new type of carbon nanotube flexible thin film smart driver that can produce large deformation under low voltage and sunlight irradiation, and simulate the hand movement of human "finger snapping" to design and develop a flexible "robot" that jumps under the stimulation of external light, which has been published in the international journal Advanced Functional Materials. Robot", the results have been published in the important international academic journal "Advanced Functional Materials".
Flexible smart drive can be light, electricity, heat, humidity and other external energy, directly into the mechanical deformation of the device itself, without the need to go through the cumbersome energy conversion device, and therefore attracted a wide range of scientists interested in research. However, research on flexible actuators with simple structure, fast and large deformation, multi-source response, and the ability to simulate complex motions such as flight and jumping still faces many challenges.
With the progress of bionics and machine vision, the emerging branch of flexible robotics, which is elastic and soft, multifunctional and bio-inspired, has emerged. Flexible robots are mainly composed of easily deformable substances such as liquids, gels and elastomers that match the elastic and rheological properties of biological tissues and organs.
Biomimetic-based flexible robots, because they were originally designed to be able to replace or even do what humans can't in a variety of complex environments, they need to interact with soft materials, living beings or artificially replicated biological functions, and therefore the materials of the machine sensing layer, generally have Young's modulus greater than 10^9 Pa (with reference to connective tissues, such as skin, muscle, etc., which have a Young's modulus of 10^2 ~10^6 Pa)
Flexible sensing layer
The manipulation of a flexible robot is the hard part, as the machine's action relies on actuators installed at each movable joint. The types of actuators currently used in flexible robots include electroactive polymers, rope actuators, shape-memory alloys, and fluid actuators; control schemes are more difficult to develop.