Highly packable and deployable electronics offer a variety of advantages in electronics and robotics by facilitating spatial efficiency. These electronics must endure extreme folding during packaging and tension to maintain a rigid structure in the deployment state. Here, we present foldable and robustly deployable electronics inspired by Plantago, characterized by their tolerance to folding and tension due to integration of tough veins within thin leaf. The primary design approach for these electronics involves a high resistance to folding and tension, achieved through a thin multilayered electronic composite, which manages the neutral axis and incorporates tough Kevlar. The fabricated electronics can be folded up to 750,000 times without malfunctions and endure pulling an object 6667 times heavier than itself without stretching. Such robust electronics can be used as a deployable robot with sensor arrays, demonstrating practical applicability, as it maintains their mechanical and electrical properties during inflation from the packaged state.
Funding: S.H., D.K., and J.-S. K. acknowledge financial support from an Ajou University research fund. This work was supported by funding from the NRF of Korea (grant nos. 2021R1C1C1011872, 2021R1A2B5B03001691, 2022R1A2C2093100, 2022R1A6A3A13071489, RS-2023-00271830, and RS-2023-00277110). This work was also supported by the Korea Environment Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI) through the Digital Infrastructure Building Project for Monitoring, Surveying, and Evaluating the Environmental Health Program, funded by the Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE) (2021003330009). This research was supported by the Nano & Material Technology Development Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by Ministry of Science and ICT (RS-2024-00403639). Author contributions: I.H., Y.R., and J.C. led and contributed equally to this work, with support from S.K., M.Ka., H.A., D.L., and J.P. in the fabrication of the DTEC. In addition, D.C., D.S., and S.I. designed the deployable gripper. C.K., and D.G. created the design schematic. T.K., J.P., M.Ki., J.L., G.L., U.K., and S.H.K. provided technical guidance on optimization. All authors contributed to proofreading the manuscript. S.H., D.K., and J.-S. K. supervised the project. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusion in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials.
