Dynamic Material Testing System for Characterizing, Investigating and Designing Artificial Muscle for Soft Robots
Abstract
Artificial muscle has been recently extensively explored in a newly emerging field-soft robotics. Inspired by biology, diverse artificial muscle material has been designed and synthesized as unconventional actuation mechanism for soft robots of different forms. To better understand and tune the performance of synthesized artificial muscle, in the project, we propose to purchase a Dynamic Material Testing System for systematic material characterization. In particular, the system will be used to measure thermo-mechanical properties of liquid crystal elastomer-based artificial muscle developed in a currently funded ONR BRC project: StarBot: Biological inspiration for manipulation and locomotion with soft robotics.The proposed Dynamic Material Testing System is composed of a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC250), dynamic mechanical testing system (ElectroForce 3330), solids analyzer (RSA-G2) and digital image correlation system (Q-400 2D DIC). The proposed system will enable us to fully determine the performance envelope of synthesized artificial muscle, and thus to design and fabricate artificial muscle with enhanced properties. Specifically, DSC250 will be used to measure thermal transition temperatures of a material; ElectroForce 3330 and RSA-G2 will be used to characterize the mechanical performance of a material under dynamic loading condition; Q-400 will be used to obtain the entire strain field on the surface of a material under different loading conditions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 23, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912340
Entities
People
- Shengqiang Cai
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of California, San Diego