Researchers have developed a new robotic muscle that is 1,000 times stronger than a human's, thanks to a material with a wide range of properties.
Vanadium dioxide has been the belle of the ball in the materials world, prized for its ability to change size, shape and physical identity. Now, material enthusiasts can add muscle power to the list of those extraordinary attributes.
Led by Junqiao Wu, a physicist with joint appointments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the material-sciences division and University of California, Berkeley’s department of material science and engineering, a team of researchers demonstrated a micro-sized robotic muscle created from vanadium dioxide, according to robotic muscle is 1,000 times more powerful than a human muscle. It can catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over distances five times its length — all within 60 milliseconds.
Vanadium dioxide is valuable because it is one of the few known materials that is both an insulator and a conductor. At low temperatures, vanadium dioxide acts as an insulator, but at 67 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit), the material abruptly becomes a conductor. What's more, vanadium dioxide crystals undergo a “temperature-driven structural phase transition” when warmed, rapidly contracting along one dimension, while expanding along the other two. All of this makes vanadium dioxide the perfect material for creating artificial muscles.
However, the device's appeal doesn't stop there. Because of its ability to “remotely detect a target and respond by reconfiguring itself to a different shape,” there’s potential to create larger systems of the vanadium dioxide muscles, according to the report.
“Multiple micro-muscles can be assembled into a micro-robotic system that simulates an active neuromuscular system,” Wu said. “This simulates living bodies where neurons sense and deliver stimuli to the muscles and the muscles provide motion.”
Image: Berkeley Lab