Electrostatic-driven soft air pump with segmented electrodes

Pneumatic soft robots have become a popular research area for future robots because of their lightweight, high efficiency, non-pollution, and high reliability. However, the pneumatic pump, which is the ‘heart’ of these robots, is large in size, heavy in weight, noisy in operation, and must be separated from the robot body, which seriously affects the portability and autonomy of the robot. Portable soft pumps fabricated using smart materials provide a viable solution to the above challenges. We present a segmented electrode pump (SEP) driven by electrostatic forces, which combines the advantages of an electro-pneumatic pump (EPP) and an enhanced electrode structure. Compared with the EPP, the developed SEP showed improved characteristics in terms of higher specific flow rate output (1.67 ml s∙g⁻¹), higher specific pressure output (0.483 kPa g⁻¹) and lower power consumption (24 mW). The proposed SEP is expected to provide new solutions to the challenges of embedding air sources and facilitating air supply flexibility, and opens up new opportunities for fully flexible robots.