Artificial Muscle by Tailoring Compliance in Magneto-kirigami Lattice

The emerging research in soft robotics and micro-robotics has sparked new opportunities for developing artificial muscles of variable length scales and in various working environments. The essential challenge lies in controlling the deformability and compliance of its structural component. In this presentation, we demonstrate a novel approach to precisely control the compliance and deformability via perturbing the elastic energy state of metastable kirigami lattices. Each metastable kirigami lattice has two stable configurations corresponding to two distinct local energy minima. Switching between these two minima leads to either stiffening or softening in lattice structures, which when cycled between these states produces an artificial muscle. Through a combination of experiments and mechanical modeling, we interpreted the stiffening or softening mechanism and characterized the performance of the designed artificial muscle. Since the underlying physics of the metastable kirigami lattice is scale invariant, this kirigami architecture may path a new way to design and fabricate low cost, lightweight artificial muscle at multiple scales.