Summary

Soft robots will be environmentally friendly if they can have a function to return to the soil, in other words, bio-degradability. We have shown that soft actuators can be built using a gelatine-glycerol mixture, a type of bio-degradable material (see figure). Bio-degradable materials change their properties as time goes, because of microbial degradation. When it comes to creating bio-degradable soft robots, this would lead to difficulties in which the same input does not result in the identical output, and robots stop functioning even before finishing the mission. The goal of our study is to establish design and control methods that take account of the degradable process of soft robots made of bio-degradable materials.