AEM Colloquium Series: Professor Mihai Duduta

Dielectric Elastomer Actuators for Soft Robots in Extreme Aerospace Environments

Soft machines are built from compliant materials, which gives them the adaptability and resilience of biological organisms when they augment or complement traditional rigid machines. This talk presents the design, fabrication, and flight of a soft robotic system carried to the Stratosphere on a high-altitude balloon. The system is enabled by a UV-curable silicone elastomer mechanism and by dielectric elastomer actuators, which operate as fully solid state compliant capacitors and maintain reliable electromechanical performance from -55 C to 120 C. Gravity, temperature, pressure, and radiation all impact different robotic components in unique ways across different time scales, and the couplings between these axes are largely unmeasured. Reduced gravity is the least understood of these parameters for soft robots, and I will describe how we plan to measure its impact, from materials and interfaces up to complete robots, on a path toward suborbital testing through NASA's RockSat program. The same solid state actuators show promise in other harsh environments, including the deep sea, the Arctic, and nuclear operations.

Mihai "Mishu" Duduta is an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Manufacturing Engineering at UConn. He completed a BS in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, then became the first employee of 24M Technologies, a start-up spun out to commercialize a battery technology he co-invented. His PhD thesis in soft robotics, completed at Harvard University under the guidance of Profs. Robert Wood and David Clarke, included work which won a Gold Award at the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting 2018 and was nominated for Best Paper at ICRA 2018. Before UConn he was a Medical Devices Innovation Fellow at the University of Minnesota, then an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering. His research group focuses on materials and manufacturing innovations that enable soft machines to operate in extreme environments. His group recently flew a soft robotic system to the Stratosphere on a high-altitude balloon and is preparing a suborbital demonstration through NASA's RockSat program. Prof. Duduta authored the book Soft Robotics: Building Machines from Soft Matter, published by De Gruyter in 2025.

AEM Colloquium Series: Professor Mihai Duduta

Dielectric Elastomer Actuators for Soft Robots in Extreme Aerospace Environments

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