Hanyang College engineers have cracked the stiffness–flexibility trade-off in tender robotics, making a polymer jumper that may leap 25 instances its size and change seamlessly between vertical and directional jumps—all powered by patterned stiffness and UV mild.
Engineers at Hanyang College have harnessed the snap-through impact—a phenomenon acquainted in hair clips, retractable pens, and Venus flytraps—to beat a longstanding trade-off in tender materials movement. Their breakthrough, revealed in Science Advances, demonstrates a polymer-based jumper that achieves each excessive vertical leaps and exact directional jumps beneath uniform ultraviolet (UV) mild.
Smooth robots and actuators typically battle with the steadiness between stiffness and suppleness. Stiff supplies can retailer power however resist bending, whereas softer ones bend simply however launch much less power. The Hanyang workforce, led by Professor Jeong Jae (JJ) Wie, solved this by embedding patterns of various stiffness inside a single liquid crystalline polymer movie.
The consequence: a jumper that makes use of snap-through transitions—sudden shifts in curvature that quickly convert saved elastic power into kinetic power—to realize record-setting efficiency. When inflexible areas have been positioned on the middle, the system propelled itself vertically as much as 49 mm, about 25 instances its size. When inflexible areas have been positioned asymmetrically on the nook, the jumper spun and leapt directionally with no need angled mild or exterior steering.
The researchers additional superior the design with a “dual-mode” jumper. By extending the movie and alternating stiff and tender segments, they enabled fast switching between vertical and directional movement in a single sequence—a versatility hardly ever seen in polymer-based tender robots. Relying on how the movie deformed, it might both snap upward in a finger-flick-like leap or arch regularly to generate directional journey.
This innovation highlights how rules from biology and bistable mechanics might be engineered into tender supplies for amplified efficiency. Past leaping robots, the method might pave the best way for actuators and units that demand highly effective but exact motion, from biomedical instruments to adaptive tender machines.By combining pure inspiration with patterned materials design, the Hanyang College workforce has demonstrated that snap-through mechanics stands out as the key to fixing considered one of tender robotics’ hardest challenges.
