Animals such as the armadillo and pangolin have natural armor as a mechanical form of protection from predators. Among the several types of armor that exist in nature, structures composed of thin elastomeric substrates with overlapping hard scales can shield underlying soft tissues from physical impacts and localized stresses while maintaining a level of mechanical compliance necessary for natural motions. Here, we design and fabricate a class of artificial armor that derives inspiration from these natural systems. The optimization process involves systematic tests of several design candidates to assess their mechanical stability against different types of mechanical stresses. The resulting platforms provide highly effective protection layers for wearable electronic devices and soft robotic systems with little constraint on their functionality, as demonstrated with representative devices.
J.C. and S.H. contributed equally to this work. This work utilized Northwestern University Micro/Nano Fabrication Facility (NUFAB), which is supported in part by Soft and Hybrid Nanotechnology Experimental (SHyNE) Resource, USA ( NSF ECCS-1542205 ), the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, USA ( DMR-1720139 ), the State of Illinois, and Northwestern University, USA . The authors thank the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics for support of this work. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) ( NRF-2019R1A2C1084419 , 2019R1C1C1007629 , 2019R1A2C1090056 ); and the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE, Korea) under Industrial Technology Innovation Program. (No. 20000512 ); and the Environmental Health Action Program (Development of receptor-based environment-induced diseases prevention and management system using real-time collected environment and health information) under Project 2018001350005; and the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT) ( 1415175191 ) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, Republic of Korea ; and the Ajou University research fund, South Korea .
