Recent work on battery-free soft robotics has demonstrated the use of liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) to build shape-changing materials activated by applied external heat. However, sources of heat must typically be in direct field-of-view of the robot (i.e. NIR, laser, and visual light EM sources or convective heats guns), be tethered to an external power supply (i.e. thermoelectric heating or resistive joule heaters), or require a heavy on-board battery that limits mobility and range. This paper presents a novel battery-free soft-robotics platform that can crawl through confined, enclosed, and hard-to-reach spaces (e.g. packages, machinery, pipes, etc.), hidden from view of heating infrastructure. This is achieved through the co-design of a soft robotics platform and integrated soft conductive traces that enable wireless (microwave) heating through remote stimulation. We achieve fast actuation through a careful choice of materials and the overall mechanical structure of the robot to maximize heating efficiency. Further, the robot is actively tracked through enclosed spaces using a mm Wave radar to direct heat to its location. We provide a detailed evaluation on the robot's heating efficiency, location-tracking accuracy and crawling speed.

This paper proposes a new primitive that allows soft robots to be physically controlled in a completely non-line-of-sight context using wireless energy - a process we call wireless actuation. Soft robots, which are composed entirely of soft materials and exclude any rigid components, are highly flexible platforms that can change their shape. This paper considers a specific class of soft robots composed of liquid-crystal elastomers (LCE) that are entirely electronics-free and engineered to change shape when heated to 60 °C. Traditionally, such robotic systems must be in line-of-sight of a light source, such as infrared to be moved, or require an external power supply for Joule heating and often take several tens of seconds to heat. We present WASER, a novel RF-based heating platform that allows electronics-free robots to be actuated rapidly (within a few seconds) and potentially in non-line-of-sight. WASER achieves this through innovations in both wireless systems and material science. On the wireless front, WASER develops a new blind beamforming solution that directs high-power wireless energy at fine spatial granularity without electronics on the robot to provide feedback. On the material science front, WASER exhibits heat-responsive shape-morphing and energy-harvesting material functionalities that allow for rapid wireless heating. We implement and evaluate WASER and demonstrate diverse shape-morphing capabilities.