An Invisible Bionic Dragonfly Based on Fully-Transparent Conductive Hydrogel and Dielectric Elastomer

Abstract

Soft actuators devoid of the use of complex and rigid infrastructure are of great interest for the development of smart, interactive, and adaptive soft electronic systems. In this paper, we report an invisible bionic dragonfly based on fully-transparent conductive hydrogel and dielectric elastomer. It is the first to use flexible and stretchable hydrogel as a conductive electrode integrated with dielectric elastomer. The synthesized ionic conductive organohydrogel exhibits good transparency, ultra-stretchability (>800%), self-adhesivity and excellent environmental stability, which is an ideal electrode candidate and shows great potentials in soft robotics. On the basis of these transparent soft actuators, rapid deformation speed can be achieved by the proposed invisible bionic dragonfly with integrated multilayer polymer composites. Shape memory alloy is further hybrid with dielectric elastomer to guarantee the high deformation amplitude. The outcome of this work can provide a new design methodology and material selection for conceptualizing bio-inspired soft robotics.