Sustainable polymers, devices and robots

Cover image of external page Journal of Materials Chemistry
Wusha Miaoa, Hedan Bai, The new material science towards sustainable robotics, J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, 12, 12721. external page DOI:10.1039/D4TC01868K

Natural organisms are evolved to be extraordinary survivors thanks to their self-healing abilities. Robots with comparable survivability could not only address pressing issues of sustainability, but also unlock powerful robotic functions such as resilience and intelligence towards physical damage. We envision a class of sustainable robots that are not easily damaged, can self-heal from damage, can survive catastrophic failure, and can be recycled or reprocessed at the end of life.

For this direction, one interest of our group is dynamic covalent polymers. This class of synthetic polymer employs dynamic covalent bonds to realize high-performance thermosets with self-healing and recycling capabilities via bond exchange. Through molecular design, we build robotic functions distributedly at the molecular level. We design and fabricate these materials into macroscopic devices and robots for real-world applications, and we address materials challenge for robotic performance arised thereof (e.g. stress relaxation). An example is the damage intelligent soft robot enabled by self-healing optical sensors as shown in the video.