Additive Manufacturing of Soft, Smart Composites

该提案将侧重于生产柔软、适应性强的材料所需的制造工艺的发展，这些材料具有感知和响应环境的能力。我们专注于软材料，因为通过在单一工艺中结合金属、硬塑料和软橡胶的多材料增材制造，可以大大改善软机器人的新兴领域。软机器人有望通过开发协作和本质安全的机器人来改善自动化、制造业、医疗设备和康复医学，这些机器人可以在人类附近工作。软机器人作为一个领域在过去的10年里迅速流行起来，尽管许多使能技术，如增材制造，已经存在了更长的时间。我们的目标是进一步开发新型的增材制造，可以直接生产柔软、耐用和电活性的材料，最终可以复制或改善人体功能。这些智能柔软的材料可以用于人造肌肉、皮肤状压力传感器、空间位置感知和自我修复能力。

This proposal will be focused on the development of the manufacturing processes required to produce soft, adaptable materials with the ability to sense and respond to the environment. We focus on soft materials because the emerging field of soft robotics can be greatly improved through the use of multi-material additive manufacturing that combines metals, hard plastics and soft rubbers in a single process. Soft robotics promise to improve automation, manufacturing, medical devices, and rehabilitative medicine through the development of collaborative and intrinsically safe robots that can work in close proximity to humans. Soft robotics as a field has exploded in popularity over the past 10 years, although many enabling technologies, such as additive manufacturing, have been around for much longer. We aim to further develop new types of additive manufacturing that can directly produce soft, durable, and electrically active materials that can eventually duplicate or improve on human function. These smart and soft materials can find use in artificial muscles, skin-like pressure sensors, awareness of position in space, and self-healing capabilities. The basic technology to be used in this work is a multi-material extruder design that we developed originally for 3D printing of stretchable electronics. It combines internal features and external feeding mechanisms to extrude multiple materials at the same time, bond different plastics together through mechanical interlocking, and vary mechanical properties from very stiff to extremely soft within a printed part, similar to the way that bone is bonded to soft skin via intermediate stiffness connective tissues. The extruder also allows us to directly print hollow shell fibers, or filaments with an independent internal channel that can be filled with oil, liquid metals, and air. We therefor have a choice of directly producing liquid filled channels for hydraulic type artificial muscle fibers, embedded electrodes for stress and strain sensors, or air filled filaments for exceptionally lightweight and thermally insulating parts. Because the manufacturing technology was recently invented by our group, the proposed research program will be based on streams of fundamental discovery on the design rules and variations that can be achieved with the use of this technology, while a second research stream will be based on specific devices such as artificial muscles, sensing of soft material position and deformation via embedded liquid electrodes, and self-healing structures. We expect this research program to provide the material building blocks necessary to produce true human mimicking functions in soft robots which may eventually help augment human abilities or collaborate with people and will ultimately provide enormous economic and health benefits to Canadians with injuries, disabilities, or age related mobility issues who are projected to be an increasing proportion of our population.