Meisam Abdi, a researcher at De Montfort University Leicester in the UK, has received a 2026/27 Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to investigate whether 3D printing can produce artificial muscles for soft robots. He is one of eight engineers in the UK to receive the award, which funds up to a year of research into materials and structures that could allow robots to move, sense and respond more like living organisms.
Abdi’s project does not aim to reproduce the physical structure of a human muscle. Instead, it will use additive manufacturing to design architected structures whose geometry gives them specific properties. He said that if people are to interact safely with robots in places such as hospitals, the field needs to move away from completely rigid structures and consider how robots can be given some of the attributes seen in living systems.
Printed architectures and electrical response
The research will model different combinations of piezoelectric, conductive and structural materials and architectures with computer-aided engineering. These designs will then be 3D printed and tested in the laboratory for their response to electrical stimulation. The longer-term aim is artificial muscles that can produce movement, sense their environment and harvest small amounts of electrical energy from mechanical movement or vibration.
Piezoelectric materials are central to the project because they can convert mechanical deformation into electrical energy and deform under an applied electric field. De Montfort University said that existing high-performance piezoelectric materials are often stiff and brittle, while some of the most widely used ones contain lead. Those characteristics complicate the development of soft, flexible and more sustainable artificial muscles.
Combining material composition and cellular structures
Abdi’s approach combines material composition with specially designed 3D printed cellular structures to reach the required properties while remaining soft and flexible. The work is intended to explore whether geometry and material choice can produce useful behavior rather than copying an existing biological structure. Abdi described biological systems as remarkable for combining movement, sensing and responses to external stimuli, and said the question is whether an artificial structure can reproduce some of those functions.
“We aren’t trying to copy something that already exists in nature,” Abdi said. “By changing the materials and the geometry of these structures, we want to see whether we can create properties that don’t currently exist naturally.”
Prototype and remaining challenge
Abdi called the project ambitious. Significant research into soft robotics already exists, he said, but creating something that can begin to replicate the multiple functions of living muscle remains a major challenge. His ambition during the fellowship is to develop a prototype that demonstrates what is possible and can provide a foundation for further research.