For soft robots to have ubiquitous adoption in practical applications they require soft actuators that provide well‐rounded actuation performance that parallels natural muscle while being inexpensive and easily fabricated. This manuscript introduces a toolkit to rapidly prototype, manufacture, test, and power various designs of hydraulically amplified self‐healing electrostatic (HASEL) actuators with muscle‐like performance that achieve all three basic modes of actuation (expansion, contraction, and rotation). This toolkit utilizes easy‐to‐implement methods, inexpensive fabrication tools, commodity materials, and off‐the‐shelf high‐voltage electronics thereby enabling a wide audience to explore HASEL technology. Remarkably, the actuators created from this easy‐to‐implement toolkit achieve linear strains exceeding 100%, a specific power greater than 150 W kg −1 , and ≈20% strain at frequencies above 100 Hz. This combination of large strain, extreme speed, and high specific power yields soft actuators that jump without power‐amplifying mechanisms. Additionally, an efficient fabrication technique is introduced for modular designs of HASEL actuators, which is used to develop soft robotic devices driven by portable electronics. Inspired by the versatility of elephant trunks, the above capabilities are combined to create an untethered continuum robot for grasping and manipulating delicate objects, highlighting the wide potential of the introduced methods for soft robots with increasing sophistication.

Soft robotics is a field of robotic system design characterized by materials and structures that exhibit large-scale deformation, high compliance, and rich multifunctionality. The incorporation of soft and deformable structures endows soft robotic systems with the compliance and resiliency that makes them well-adapted for unstructured and dynamic environments. While actuation mechanisms for soft robots vary widely, soft electrostatic transducers such as dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) and hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic (HASEL) actuators have demonstrated promise due to their muscle-like performance and capacitive selfsensing capabilities. Despite previous efforts to implement self-sensing in electrostatic transducers by overlaying sinusoidal low-voltage signals, these designs still require sensing high-voltage signals, requiring bulky components that prevent integration with miniature, untethered soft robots. We present a circuit design that eliminates the need for any high-voltage sensing components, thereby facilitating the design of simple, low cost circuits using off-the-shelf components. Using this circuit, we perform simultaneous sensing and actuation for a range of electrostatic transducers including circular DEAs and HASEL actuators and demonstrate accurate estimated displacements with errors under 4%. We further develop this circuit into a compact and portable system that couples HV actuation, sensing, and computation as a prototype towards untethered, multifunctional soft robotic systems. Finally, we demonstrate the capabilities of our self-sensing design through feedback-control of a robotic arm powered by Peano-HASEL actuators.

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