Harnessing Liquid Crystal Elastomers for Locomotion and Mechanical Intelligence in a Soft Robot

Recently, there has been an increased interest in endowing intelligent behaviors and features in soft robotic systems. As a prerequisite for intelligence, a system must integrate sensing, information processing, and the ability to act in response to external stimuli. This work presents a soft robotic crawler that demonstrates locomotion using electroactive liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs). By integrating independent components such as a photo-responsive LCE switch into a conductive electromechanical processing network based on sequential logic, the robot can sense optical indicators and process this information to change direction autonomously. This study expands the design of the individual mechanical material subsystems and experimentally showcases the autonomous operation of the soft robot. The embedded bistable mechanism stores the present operational state of the robot and enforces directional locomotion by controlling the position of a mechanical hard stop that interfaces with the legs. The robot exemplifies the advanced potential of soft intelligent material systems for complex autonomous behavior, leveraging the unique properties of LCEs and a mechanical-electrical network for information processing without the need for traditional electronic controllers.