Self-Healing Materials For Robotics Composed of ‘Jelly’ and Salt

Scientists have developed self-healing, biodegradable, 3D-printed materials that could be used to develop realistic artificial hands and other soft robotics applications.

The low-cost jelly-like materials, developed by scientists at the University of Cambridge, can sense strain, temperature, and humidity. Furthermore, unlike earlier self-healing robots, they can additionally partially repair themselves at room temperature.

The outcomes are reported in the journal NPG Asia Materials.

Jelly-like materials

Soft sensing technologies could alter robotics, tactile interfaces, and wearable tools, among other applications. However, most soft sensing technologies are not sturdy and utilize high amounts of power.

” Incorporating soft sensors into robotics enables us to get a lot even more data from them, like exactly how strain on our muscles allows our brains to get details regarding the state of our bodies,” said David Hardman from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the first author of the paper.

As part of the EU-funded SHERO project, Hardman and his colleagues have actually been working to establish soft sensing self-healing materials for robot hands and arms. These materials can detect when they are damaged, take the necessary actions to recover themselves temporarily, and after that resume work– all without the need for human interaction.

“We have been working with self-healing materials for many years, but nowadays we are checking into faster and more affordable ways to make self-healing robotics,” said co-author Dr. Thomas George-Thuruthel, as well from the Department of Engineering.

Earlier versions of the self-healing robots needed to be heated to heal, but the Cambridge scientists are currently creating materials that can recover at room temperature, which would certainly make them better for real-world applications.

” We began with a stretchy, gelatine-based material which is cheap, biodegradable, and biocompatible and carried out different examinations on how to integrate sensors right into the material by including lots of conductive components,” said Hardman.

A ground-breaking innovation

The researchers discovered that printing sensors having sodium chloride– salt– rather than carbon ink resulted in a material with the properties they were seeking. Since salt is soluble in the water-filled hydrogel, it gives a consistent channel for ionic conduction– the movement of ions.

The researchers found that modifications in strain resulted in a very straight response when measuring the electrical resistance of the printed materials. They could use this response to calculate the deformations of the material. Including salt also enabled sensing of stretches of greater than three times the sensor’s initial size so that the material can be integrated into flexible and stretchable robot devices.

The self-healing materials are cheap and easily done, either by 3D printing or casting. They are preferable to numerous existing options considering that they show lasting strength and stability without drying, and they are made entirely from commonly available, food-safe materials.

Robotic revolution

“It is a truly good sensor considering how cheap and easy it is to make,” stated George-Thuruthel. “We could build a whole robot out of gelatine and print the sensors any place we need them.”

The self-healing hydrogels bond well with a variety of different materials, meaning they can quickly be incorporated with various other kinds of robotics. For example, a lot of the study in the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, where the scientists are based, is focused on the growth of artificial hands. This material is a proof of concept. It might be incorporated right into artificial skins and personalized wearable and biodegradable sensors if developed even more.

This work was sustained by the Self-HEaling soft RObotics (SHERO) project, financed under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) program of the European Commission.

Read the original article on Science Daily.

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Reference: David Hardman, Thomas George Thuruthel, Fumiya Iida. Self-healing ionic gelatin/glycerol hydrogels for strain sensing applications. NPG Asia Materials, 2022; 14 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41427-022-00357-9