| Abstract Scope |
Robots today rely on rigid components and electric motors, making them heavy, unsafe near humans, expensive and ill-suited for unpredictable environments. Nature, in contrast, uses soft materials like muscle and skin, and has produced organisms that drastically outperform robots in terms of agility, dexterity, and adaptability. To create a new generation of lifelike robots that match the vast capabilities of biological systems, we need to develop actuators that replicate the astonishing all-around actuation performance of muscle. Hydraulically Amplified Self-healing ELectrostatic (HASEL) transducers are a new class of self-sensing, high-performance muscle-mimetic actuators, which are electrically driven and match or exceed most performance metrics of biological muscle; modeling results reveal rich underlying materials science to be further explored, and they lay out a roadmap towards HASELs with drastically improve performance, far surpassing both biological muscle and traditional electromagnetic motors. This talk gives an overview over the latest research results and commercialization efforts. |