UC San Diego

Soft robotics, inspired by biological systems, has emerged as a promising field with vast potential for application in various domains, including healthcare, exploration, and industry. Soft materials, especially those that are responsive to external fields (e.g., heat, light, electric field), can endow soft robotic devices with unusual properties and inspire undiscovered applications. This thesis investigates the utilization of responsive soft materials in soft robotic devices, focusing on their design, synthesis, characterization, and application in practical settings. We choose two material systems: thermally responsive liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) and electrically responsive polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel, as a showcase, to demonstrate how to take advantage of their unique properties to advance the capabilities of soft robotic devices.