The overall objective of the SMART project is to train 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) with a training through research in the fields of soft robotics with innovative smart materials having self-healing, sensing and actuation properties.
In this field of soft robotics, the following problems have been identified:
1: Robotic systems are typically dimensioned to be able to withstand occasional extreme loads, instead of being designed based on their performance tasks. This over-dimensioning, resulting in heavy and oversized robotic systems, is a first problem that is being addressed. A lighter and more compact system is needed.
2: Robotic designs become more complex as their tasks and performance become ever more complicated and demanding. The composing parts and components in such complex robotic systems become less accessible for maintenance. When a component fails, large parts of the robotic system have to be disassembled in order to replace it, which is a very costly and time-consuming intervention done by specialists.
3: Animals exploit soft structures to move in complex environments. These capabilities have inspired robotic engineers to incorporate soft technologies into actuator designs, and led to the development of smart actuators. Standard control schemes are not suitable for soft robots due to the inherent deformability of the material. This makes the derivation of accurate and tractable dynamic models and their control principles challenging and innovative solutions have to be developed.
4: Smart materials with sensing, actuation and self-healing capabilities provide the necessary tools to overcome or mitigate the previous problems. However, these smart materials are still in full development. Preliminary experiments proved that producing robotic parts with smart materials is feasible, but dedicated materials are missing.
5: Robotics can provide an innovative breakthrough in materials science by lifting smart materials into fully functional smart systems. This full integration is still not a reality and further breakthroughs are needed.
The overall long-term research objective of the SMART project is the ambitious breakthrough to develop a material-oriented solution for smart soft structures. By integrating engineered functional materials, we are developing soft robotic systems to sense, actuate and heal damages so the soft robot can interact with a dynamic and unknown environment while being able to self-heal incurred damage due to fatigue, overloading, and sharp objects present in the environment or by human contact.
This aim can be divided into 3 specific research objectives (RO):
RO.1: Development, characterization and tuning of stimuli-responsive materials with smart, adaptive and self-healing properties for industrial and commercial applications, designed using greener chemistries and for dedicated, user-defined properties and functionalities.
RO.2: Development and optimization of manufacturing processes for complex geometries and intelligent design. Development of smart actuator/sensor systems with dedicated smart control and response system through artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.
RO.3: Development of fully autonomous smart soft robotic demonstrators and derived applications.
