The authors proposed a fabricating process for soft actuators, named 4D printing system for magnetic gel materials. 4D printer is a recently developed process that can print out not only a 3-dimensional structure but also deformations in the printed structure at the same time. Our proposing process utilizes a gel material dispersed with magnetic particles as a starting material. We can design magnetic anisotropy in each portion of the printed object during additive manufacturing so that the printed structures could deform under an applied magnetic field. In this paper, we demonstrated 2 kinds of biomimetic examples by this printing system, a worm-type soft actuator and an array of artificial cilia. The first example could crawl in a narrow gap. The second one could reproduce a metachronal wave, which is a phase propagation wave found on natural small organisms. These demonstrations show that the proposed printing system could output variable bio-mimic soft actuators.
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