A Miniaturized Light-Driven Soft Crawler Based On Liquid Crystal Elastomer with High-Efficient Photothermal Thin-Film

This work presents a miniaturized soft crawler inspired by the rectilinear locomotion of snakes. The proposed crawler consists of two claw-like legs and an arched actuator connecting the legs. The soft crawler, which comprises liquid crystal elastomer (LCE), was fabricated monolithically by using a lithography-based molding process. A photothermal thin-film (PTF) dispersed with liquid metal nanoparticles is deposited on the actuator for inducing actuation. The experiment results show that the PTF is sufficient to trigger LCE actuation under NIR illumination, and that introducing liquid metal into PTF effectively reduces the thermal time constants by 33%. The crawler locomotion under periodic NIR excitations was also successfully demonstrated.