Soft electronics and robotic devices could, like human skin, recover autonomously from damage with a new design made by Stanford scientists.
In its latest study, a research team described how they combined two dynamic polymers to achieve autonomous realignment in multilayered soft electronics. This could help devices recover from various forms of damage such as being hit by something or dropped to the ground.
Usually, these devices are multilayered and embedded with conductive or dielectric materials to achieve functional properties while also maintaining the soft mechanical properties of the self-healing polymer matrix.
Moreover, self-healing devices often require manual realignment of individual layers after damage to properly align different functional components within the polymer, as even slightly misaligned layers can limit the functional recovery of a device.
For these reasons, autonomous self-healing robots have been extremely difficult to design...