Ultralow Voltage High‐Performance Bioartificial Muscles Based on Ionically Crosslinked Polypyrrole‐Coated Functional Carboxylated Bacterial Cellulose for Soft Robots

Abstract

The development of ultralow voltage high‐performance bioartificial muscles with large bending strain, fast response time, and excellent actuation durability is highly desirable for promising applications such as soft robotics, active biomedical devices, flexible haptic displays, and wearable electronics. Herein, a novel high‐performance low‐priced bioartificial muscle based on functional carboxylated bacterial cellulose (FCBC) and polypyrrole (PPy) nanoparticles is reported, exhibiting a large bending strain of 0.93%, long actuated bending durability (96% retention for 5 h) under an ultralow harmonic input of 0.5 V, broad frequency bandwidth up to 10 Hz, fast response time (≈4 s) in DC responses, high energy density (6.81 KJ m−3), and high power density (5.11 KW m−3), all of which mainly stem from its high surface area and porosity, large specific capacitance, tuned mechanical properties, and strong ionic interactions of cations and anions in ionic liquid with FCBC and PPy nanoparticles. More importantly, bioinspired applications such as the grapple robot, bionic medical stent, bionic flower, and wings‐vibrating have been realized. These successful demonstrations offer a viable means for developing high‐performance bioartificial muscles for next‐generation soft bioelectronics including bioinspired robotics, biomedical microdevices, and wearable electronics.

Nanocellulose‐Based Functional Materials: From Chiral Photonics to Soft Actuator and Energy Storage

“…Promising technologies that can be imagined for the future include structural color manipulation, developments in energy harvesting, and soft robotics, which are elaborately devised to adaptively respond to sophisticated environmental challenges. [399][400][401][402][403] Furthermore, nanocellulose-derived functional materials are also applied in several other fields, such as water treatment, thermal management, hydrogels, ionic conduction, transistor, and smart radiative cooling. [403][404][405][406][407][408][409][410][411] It is expected that the development of nanocellulose-based advanced functional materials will yield unlimited opportunities and challenges and will continue to be a prosperous research field involving scientists and engineers from diverse technological backgrounds.…”

A Pneumatic Generator Based on Gas-Liquid Reversible Transition for Soft Robots

“…Since the dissolution characteristics of the gas at the fast depressurization stage are similar to that at the pressurization stage featuring convective mass transfer, the dissolution rate of gas conforms to Equation (14). Substituting it into (22)…”

“…Chu et al [21] described a unipolar stroke carbon nanotube yarn muscle in which the stroke substantially increased with the increasing potential scan rate. Wang et al [22] proposed a bioartificial muscle based on functional carboxylated bacterial cellulose and polypyrrole nanoparticles, with a bending strain of 0.93% under an ultralow voltage for soft robots. However, the soft actuators above generally have weak load capacity, small deformation or high driving voltages, and the complex or bulky external equipment for generating magnetism and light is always necessary.…”

Review on Improvement, Modeling, and Application of Ionic Polymer Metal Composite Artificial Muscle

“…Artificial muscles include not only new intelligent shape memory materials that mimic the actual animal muscle structure through biotechnology, but also actuators powered by electricity, magnetic energy, or chemical energy [1][2][3]. Compared with traditional motor driving, artificial muscles have many advantages, such as versatility, a high power-to-weight ratio, and a high stressto-weight ratio, without the need for complicated connection devices [4][5][6][7]. Over the past 30 years, artificial muscle has shown great potential in applications such as bionic robots, robotic prostheses, exoskeletons, medical robots, and soft robots [8][9][10].…”