Highly Dynamic Soft Electrohydraulic Origami Actuators for Agile and Multimodal Robotic Locomotion

ABSTRACT Achieving comparable mobility of natural creatures is always the pursuit of soft robots for better adapting dynamic environments and uncertain tasks such as field exploration, search and rescue, etc. However, most current soft robots still lag far behind natural vertebrate counterparts in both agility and speed, which mainly attributes to the limited degrees of freedom or morphing modes and performance of soft actuators. Here, we report a new methodology of electrohydraulic origami (EHO) for creating powerful and multimodal soft actuators with large strain, high speed, lightweight, flexibility, reconfigurability, and programmability. By leveraging the transmission and reconfiguration of origami structures, the simple and low‐strain actuation of soft electrohydraulic actuators are enriched and amplified, and an ultra‐large actuation strain (3300%) and strain rate (over 23,500% s −1 ) were achieved by the EHO actuators, as well as the high dynamic multimodal actuation (extension, rotation, and translation). We then demonstrate three types of electrohydraulic soft robots that perform high‐speed bidirectional legless sliding, multidirectional jumping, and crawling based on the shape morphing and reconfiguration of EHO actuators. Moreover, untethered crawling robots were developed that achieve multidirectional crawling and higher average crawling speed than most existing soft robots driven by electro‐active soft actuators. This study offers an effective strategy for creating high‐performance and multimodal soft actuators and may also pave the way for electrohydraulic soft robots in real‐world applications.