Designing Liquid Crystal Elastomers for Soft Robotic Actuators

Programmable, stimuli-responsive materials are of significant interest for soft robotics, adaptive electronics, and wearable or implantable biomedical devices as promising alternatives to conventional rigid mechanical and electronic systems. Among them, liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) offer unique advantages by converting external stimuli into large, reversible, and programmable deformations through the coupling of molecular anisotropy and rubber elasticity. This presentation highlights our recent advances in functional LCE materials, spanning molecular patterning, semicrystalline network engineering, composite architectures, and intelligent device integration. Programming molecular order, network architecture, and macroscopic geometry in LCEs enables electrically driven fibers for reconfigurable artificial muscles and photochemically driven springs for underwater robotic actuators. Collectively, these advances illustrate how molecular order programming, anisotropic network design, and advanced processing strategies can be integrated to expand the role of functional stimuli-responsive polymeric materials in next-generation intelligent robotics, adaptive electronics, and sustainable technologies.