Autonomous Bending Modules Of Ionic Liquid Gel Soft Robot

Due to its soft structure and novel driving style,the software robot can work in the limited environment of traditional rigid robots.In recent years,it has received extensive attention from academia and industry.The drive mode of the software robot abandons the traditional motor drive and rigid component drive,so the development of the new flexible drive has become the focus of software robot research.As a new type of electric brake flexible material,ionic liquid gel has solid self-binding characteristics on a macro scale and liquid mobility on a micro scale,which can be used in the manufacture of software robots.The driving principle of ionic liquid gel flexible actuator is multi-physics coupling effect.At present,there is no mature method to calculate its deformation behavior.The more accepted mechanism is that the free state ions inside the gel migrate under the action of electrostatic field.The difference in the volume ratio of anions and cations is large,causing the positive and negative electrodes to expand or contract.Since the thermal expansion effect is similar to the swelling behavior of the ionic liquid gel positive and negative electrodes,the thermal expansion model can be used instead of the force-electric coupling effect.In this paper,the thermal expansion equivalent model of the ionic liquid gel flexible actuator is established.The iterative convergence calculation can be used to obtain the equivalent electric coupling coefficient.In addition,from the point of view of mechanical analysis,ionic liquid gel deformation is closer to superelastic materials.In this paper,the ionic liquid gel flexible actuators are analyzed by using the superelastic constitutive and linear elastic constitutives with different parameters.The analysis results under different models are compared.Finally,based on the experience of numerical simulation analysis,this paper designs three new types of ionic liquid gel flexible actuators that can realize two-dimensional bending motion through structural design and optimization,which can be used in environments such as bionic crawling,peristalsis,medical detection and surgery.