Engineering Commons^™

4d Printing Dielectric Elastomer Actuator Based Soft Robots, Jiyu Cai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

4D printing is an emerging technology that prints 3D structural smart materials that can respond to external stimuli and change shape over time. 4D printing represents a major manufacturing paradigm shift from single-function static structures to dynamic structures with highly integrated functionalities. Direct printing of dynamic structures can provide great benefits (e.g., design freedom, low material cost) to a wide variety of applications, such as sensors and actuators, and robotics. Soft robotics is a new direction of robotics in which hard and rigid components are replaced by soft and flexible materials to mimic mechanisms that works in living creatures, which …