Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lin, Bo-You
• Liao, Yen-Peng
• Yang, Yao-Joe

Titel

A Miniaturized Light-Driven Soft Crawler Based On Liquid Crystal Elastomer with High-Efficient Photothermal Thin-Film

Ist Teil von

• 2022 IEEE 35th International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems Conference (MEMS), 2022, p.628-631

Ort / Verlag

IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

IEEE Xplore

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This work presents a miniaturized soft crawler inspired by the rectilinear locomotion of snakes. The proposed crawler consists of two claw-like legs and an arched actuator connecting the legs. The soft crawler, which comprises liquid crystal elastomer (LCE), was fabricated monolithically by using a lithography-based molding process. A photothermal thin-film (PTF) dispersed with liquid metal nanoparticles is deposited on the actuator for inducing actuation. The experiment results show that the PTF is sufficient to trigger LCE actuation under NIR illumination, and that introducing liquid metal into PTF effectively reduces the thermal time constants by 33%. The crawler locomotion under periodic NIR excitations was also successfully demonstrated.