Bio-inspired Artificial Pellicle

Inspired by the proteinaceous strips in the pellicle of cells from the Euglena family, we fabricated artificial polymer strips. The cross section closely resembles that found in the organisms. (See picture below). Flexible sheets can be constructed by interlocking several of these strips. A change in the the shape of the structure results from the sliding of these strips against each other. Soft robots constructed in this manner can exhibit giant changes in shape.

This work is now published in Robotics and Automation Letters. I will be presenting this work at the ICRA 2019. Access the paper on IEEE Xplore.