Structured computational polymers for safety, security, and rescue robotics

Structured Computational Polymers, or SCP, is a concept of a layered, active material that can perceive its environment and respond to it “intelligently” via its embedded cognitive ability. This material will combine sensing, actuating, and information processing in a distributed fashion by the use of conducting and semiconducting polymer technology. In this paper we report on the progress made towards developing such a multifunctional active material that will be the basis of a soft robot - a robot, made of flexible materials, which can adjust to its changing environment, as it is not bounded by a rigid structure. We demonstrate that a distributed actuation can be achieved via a novel concept called water hammer effect. We also show that the direction of the propulsion due to force impact from the water hammer effect depends upon the shape of the polymer tubing. Furthermore we demonstrate that distributed cognition can be made with a type of organic neuromorphic architecture, termed Synthetic Neural Network (SNN), which is modeled after Artificial Neural Network, and is based on a single-transistor-single-bistable-device-per-input for an individual synthetic neuron design, that approximates the sigmoidal activation function. We show that SNN can be used to accurately predict directional propulsion due to water hammer effect.