Transforming Arduino Boards into Flexible Circuits for Soft Robotics

Recently, a research team from Yale University did something interesting: they designed the well-known rigid Arduino boards into flexible, stretchable circuits and integrated them into soft robots, achieving 300% high stretchability and providing advanced computing capabilities for soft robots. This groundbreaking work was successfully published in Science Robotics (IF=26.1).

To achieve functionality in the real world, robots must possess decision-making computing capabilities. However, soft robots need to stretch, which necessitates solutions beyond rigid computers. Current examples of embedding computation into soft robots include attaching rigid printed circuit boards to the robots, integrating flexible logic gates, and utilizing material responses for material-embedded computation. Although these methods are promising, they come with limitations such as rigidity, tethering requirements, or low logic gate density. The field of stretchable electronics has been seeking solutions to these challenges, but a complete pipeline for directly integrating single-board computers, microcontrollers, and other complex circuits into soft robots remains elusive.

To address this, the Yale University team led by Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio proposed a universal method for converting any complex two-layer circuit into a soft, stretchable form. This allows the creation of stretchable single-board microcontrollers (including Arduinos) and other commercial circuits (including SparkFun circuits) without simplifying the design. As a practical demonstration of this method, the authors embedded highly stretchable (>300% strain) Arduino Pro Minis inside multiple soft robots. This utilized inert structural materials, realizing the vision of the stretchable electronics field to integrate cutting-edge computing capabilities into active, robust, stretchable systems.