The ignition of flammable liquids and gases in offshore oil and gas environments is a major risk and can cause loss of life, serious injury, and significant damage to infrastructure. Power supplies that are used to provide regulated voltages to drive motors, relays, and power electronic controls can produce heat and cause sparks. As a result, the European Union requires ATEX certification on electrical equipment to ensure safety in such extreme environments. Implementing designs that meet this standard is time-consuming and adds to the cost of operations. Soft robots are often made with soft materials and can be actuated pneumatically, without electronics, making these systems inherently compliant with this directive. In this paper, we aim to increase the capability of new soft robotic systems moving from a one-to-one control-actuator architecture and implementing an electronics-free control system. We have developed a robot that demonstrates locomotion and gripping using three-pneumatic lines: a vacuum power line, a control input, and a clock line. We have followed the design principles of digital electronics and demonstrated an integrated fluidic circuit with eleven, fully integrated fluidic switches and six actuators. We have realized the basic building blocks of logical operation into combinational logic and memory using our fluidic switches to create a two-state automata machine. This system expands on the state of the art increasing the complexity over existing soft systems with integrated control. Figure 1. An integrated and logically controlled soft robot. (a) The soft robot controls six actuators connected to the legs, colored orange and blue. The controller circuit is designed to engage the orange actuators and the blue actuator sequentially. (b) The fluidic architecture shows a JK flip-flop. The circuit has three inputs including a vacuum power line, a clock line, and a control input, with six outputs to vacuum actuators from Q and Q ̅ .

Gallium alloy based liquid metals (LMs) have shown great promise for soft and stretchable electronics in virtue of intrinsic uidity and metallic conductivity. However, it has been a challenge by using LM to construct 3D structured circuits which are crucial for building exible electronics with high integration. Hereby, taking advantage of the solid-liquid phase transition and plastic deformation of a Ga-10In LM alloy, we propose a novel strategy to fabricate LM based exible electronic devices, in particular comprised of 3D circuits, without the need to pre-fabricate microchannels. We demonstrate applications including 3D interconnect arches for the integration of a multi-channel LED array, a 3D structured wearable sensor and a multilayer exible circuit board for monitoring of nger movement. The current work provides a facile strategy for constructing LM based exible electronics, which is of particular interest for building highly integrated electronics of hierarchical structure involving complicated 3D circuits.

No abstract

In recent years, real-time health management has been received increasing attention, benefiting from the rapid development of flexible and wearable devices. Conventionally, flexible and wearable devices were used in collecting...