a plug-and-play soft modular origami robot is introduced, enabled by electrothermal actuation with highly bendable heaters.
the heater, based on a stretchable silver nanowire conductor, exhibits large, reversible local bending along the crease line of the origami. our modular origami robot draws inspiration from the segmented caterpillar body. by mimicking the rich kinematics of caterpillar segments, each robot module features reprogrammable actuation modes, i.e., extension/contraction and bending. the desired deformation modes of the modular units, bidirectional and/or steering, can be achieved on the fly. this work reports an effective actuation method that can be generally applied to origami structures (with creases) for soft robotics.
