Liquid Metal Soft Machines: Principles and Applications

This book discusses the core principles and practical applications of a brand new machine category: liquid-metal soft machines and motors. After a brief introduction on the conventional soft robot and its allied materials, it presents the new conceptual liquid-metal machine, which revolutionizes existing rigid robots, both large and small. It outlines the typical features of the soft liquid-metal materials and describes the various transformation capabilities, mergence of separate metal droplets, self-rotation and planar locomotion of liquid-metal objects under external or internal mechanism. Further, it introduces a series of unusual phenomena discovered while developing the shape changeable smart soft machine and interprets the related mechanisms regarding the effects of the shape, size, voltage, orientation and geometries of the external fields to control the liquid-metal transformers. Moreover, the book illustrates typical strategies to construct a group of different advanced functional liquid-metal soft machines, since such machines or robots are hard to fabricate using rigid-metal or conventional materials. With highly significant fundamental and practical findings, this book is intended for researchers interested in establishing a general method for making future smart soft machine and accompanying robots.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Basic Properties Of Liquid Metal And Soft Matter
Chapter 3 Injectable Transformation Of Liquid Metal
Chapter 4 Electrically Induced Transformations Of Liquid Metal Among Different Morphologies
Chapter 5 Reversible Transformation Of Liquid Metal Machine
Chapter 6 Electromagnetic Field Induced Transformation Of Liquid Metal
Chapter 7 Self Fuelled Transformable Liquid Metal Machine
Chapter 8 Self-Powered Tiny Liquid Metal Motors
Chapter 9 Liquid Metal Transient State Machine
Chapter 10 Directional Control Of Self-Fuelled Liquid Metal Machine
Chapter 11 Environment Enabled Liquid Metal Machine
Chapter 12 Nanoparticles Enabled Liquid Metal Motions
Chapter 13 Substrate Enabled Liquid Metal Machine
Chapter 14 Chemicals Enabled Liquid Metal Machine
Chapter 15 Hybrid Liquid Metal Machine
Chapter 16 Liquid Metal Wheeled 3D-Printed Vehicle