Meisam Abdi, a researcher at De Montfort University Leicester in the UK, has been awarded a 2026/27 Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to investigate whether additive manufacturing 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.
Moving away from rigid structures
Abdi frames the motivation around safety in shared spaces. If people are to interact safely with robots in settings such as hospitals, he argues, the field needs to move away from completely rigid structures and consider how robots can be given some of the attributes found in living systems.
Rather than reproducing the physical structure of a human muscle, Abdi plans to use additive manufacturing to design architected structures whose geometry itself delivers specific properties. Different combinations of piezoelectric, conductive and structural materials will be modelled with computer-aided engineering, 3D printed, and then tested in the laboratory for how they respond to electrical stimulation.
Working around piezoelectric trade-offs
The project centres on piezoelectric materials, which can convert mechanical deformation into electrical energy and deform when an electric field is applied. According to DMU, existing high-performance piezoelectric materials are often stiff and brittle, and some of the most widely used contain lead, which complicates the development of soft, flexible and more sustainable artificial muscles. Abdi's approach pairs material composition with specially designed 3D printed cellular structures in an attempt to reach the required properties while remaining soft and flexible.
The longer-term aim is an artificial muscle able to produce movement, sense its environment and harvest small amounts of electrical energy from mechanical movement or vibration.
Not copying nature
Abdi points to biological systems as the inspiration without treating them as a template. Living systems are remarkable, he said, because they combine movement, sensing and responses to external stimuli, and the question for the project is whether an artificial structure can be designed and manufactured to reproduce some of those functions. He added that the team is not trying to copy something that already exists in nature, but rather to change materials and geometry to see whether properties that do not currently exist naturally can be created.
He described the fellowship as an ambitious project. Research into soft robotics is already substantial, he noted, but creating something that can begin to replicate the multiple functions of living muscle remains a major challenge. His stated ambition for the fellowship is to develop a prototype that demonstrates what is possible and provides a foundation for further research.