A Healable Resistive Heater as a Stimuli-Providing System in Self-Healing Soft Robots
Seyedreza Kashef Tabrizian, Fatemeh Sahraeeazartamar, Joost Brancart, Ellen Roels, Pasquale Ferrentino, Julie Legrand, Guy Van Assche, Bram Vanderborght
Abstract
Self-healing polymers can address the damage susceptibility in soft robotics. However, in most cases, their healing requires a heat stimulus, provided by an external device. This letter presents a self-healing soft actuator with an integrated healable flexible heater, functioning as the stimuli-providing system. The actuator is constructed out of thermoreversible elastomers that are crosslinked by the Diels-Alder (DA) reaction, which provides the healing ability. The heater is manufactured from a DA-based composite network filled with 20 wt% carbon black to provide electrically conductive properties for resistive Joule heating. The flexibility of the heater does not compromise the actuator performance upon integration and the self-healing properties of both heater and actuator allow for damage repair. This includes very large damages, as both heater and actuator can recover (near 100%) from being cut completely in two pieces, using Joule heating at 90°C with a bias voltage of about 30 V. The embedded heater avoids the need for external intervention in the healing process, and provides healing quality assessment and a healing on-demand mechanism, paving the way for an optimum healing solution of damage resilient soft robots that require heat as a healing stimulus.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2022_ahealableresisti,
title = {A Healable Resistive Heater as a Stimuli-Providing System in Self-Healing Soft Robots},
author = {Seyedreza Kashef Tabrizian and Fatemeh Sahraeeazartamar and Joost Brancart and Ellen Roels and Pasquale Ferrentino and Julie Legrand and Guy Van Assche and Bram Vanderborght and Seppe Terryn},
booktitle = {RA-L 2022},
year = {2022}
}