Recent advances in soft materials enable robots to possess safer human-machine interaction ways and adaptive motions, yet there remain substantial challenges to develop universal driving power sources that can achieve performance trade-offs between actuation, speed, portability, and reliability in untethered applications. Here, we introduce a class of fully soft electronic pumps that utilize electrical energy to pump liquid through electrons and ions migration mechanism. Soft pumps combine good portability with excellent actuation performances. We develop special functional liquids that merge unique properties of electrically actuation and self-healing function, providing a direction for self-healing fluid power systems. Appearances and pumpabilities of soft pumps could be customized to meet personalized needs of diverse robots. Combined with a homemade miniature high-voltage power converter, two different soft pumps are implanted into robotic fish and vehicle to achieve their untethered motions, illustrating broad potential of soft pumps as universal power sources in untethered soft robotics.
Flexible, material‐based, artificial muscles enable compliant and safe technologies for human–machine interaction devices and adaptive soft robots, yet there remain long‐term challenges in the development of artificial muscles capable of mimicking flexible, controllable, and multifunctional human activity. Inspired by human limb's activity strategy, combining muscles' adjustable stiffness and joints' origami folding, controllable stiffness origami “skeletons,” which are created by laminar jamming and origami folding of multiple layers of flexible sandpaper, are embedded into a common monofunctional vacuumed‐powered cube‐shaped (CUBE) artificial muscle, thereby enabling the monofunctional CUBE artificial muscle to achieve lightweight and multifunctionality as well as controllable force/motion output without sacrificing its volume and shape. Successful demonstrations of arms self‐assembly and cooperatively gripping different objects and a “caterpillar” robot climbing different pipes illustrate high operational redundancy and high‐force output through “building blocks” assembly of multifunctional CUBE artificial muscles. Controllable stiffness origami “skeletons” offer a facile and low‐cost strategy to fabricate lightweight and multifunctional artificial muscles for numerous potential applications such as wearable assistant devices, miniature surgical instruments, and soft robots.
Soft robotics revolutionized human-robot interactions, yet there exist persistent challenges for developing high-performance soft actuators that are powerful, rapid, controllable, safe, and portable. Here, we introduce a class of self-contained soft electrofluidic actuators (SEFAs), which can directly convert electrical energy into the mechanical energy of the actuators through electrically responsive fluids that drive the outside elastomer deformation. The use of special dielectric liquid enhances fluid flow capabilities, improving the actuation performance of the SEFAs. SEFAs are easily manufactured by using widely available materials and common fabrication techniques, and display excellent comprehensive performances in portability, controllability, rapid response, versatility, safety, and actuation. An artificial muscle stretching a joint and a soft bionic ray swimming in a tank demonstrate their effective performance. Hence, SEFAs offer a platform for developing soft actuators with potential applications in wearable assistant devices and soft robots.
A new simplified-parametric model is proposed to describe the nonlinear displacementdependent damping characteristics of a railway pantograph hydraulic damper and validated by the experimental results in this study. Then, a full mathematical model of the pantograph-catenary system, which incorporates the new pantograph damper model, is established to simulate the effect of the damping characteristics on the pantograph dynamics. The simulation results show that large Fconst and C0 in the pantograph damper model can improve both the raising performance and contact quality of the pantograph, whereas a large C0 has no obvious effect on the lowering time of the pantograph; the nonlinear damping characteristics described by the second item in the new damper model have dominating effects on the total lowering time, maximum acceleration and maximum impact acceleration of the pantograph. Thus, within the constraint of total lowering time, increasing the second item damping characteristics of the damper will obviously improve the lowering performance of the pantograph and reduce excessive impact between the pantograph and its base frame. The proposed concise pantograph hydraulic damper model appears to be more complete and accurate than the previous single-parameter model, so it is more useful in the context of pantograph-catenary dynamics simulation and further parameter optimizations. The obtained simulation results are also valuable and instructive for further optimal specification of railway pantograph hydraulic dampers.
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