Multiresponsive actuators based on modified electrospun films

Abstract

Robot technology has made great progress over the past few decades, and has found wide use in military, industrial and service fields. In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the demand for soft robots. However, as a key part, the development of soft actuators capable of low-energy actuation, multi-stimulation response, and large shape deformation is still challenging. In this work, we fabricated multiresponsive actuators based on modified electrospun films. The actuators provided the largest curvatures of 0.83 cm⁻¹, 0.6 cm⁻¹, and 1.05 cm⁻¹, stimulated by humidity, light, and electricity, respectively. Furthermore, we designed a biomimetic application—a crawling robot—which demonstrates excellent potential applications of the actuator in soft robotics, artificial muscles, and the biomimetics field.