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 3D printing can produce artificial muscles for soft robots.
Abdi is one of eight UK engineers to receive the award, which funds up to a year of research into materials and structures that could help robots move, sense and respond more like living organisms.
According to Abdi, safe human-robot interaction in settings such as hospitals would require moving away from completely rigid structures and considering how robots could be given some of the attributes found in living systems.
Rather than attempting to reproduce the physical structure of a human muscle, Abdi plans to use additive manufacturing to design architected structures whose geometry gives them specific properties. Different combinations of piezoelectric, conductive and structural materials and architectures will be modeled with computer-aided engineering, 3D printed and tested in the laboratory for their response to electrical stimulation. The tests will examine how the printed structures react when an electric field is applied, a step toward the project’s longer-term goal of components that can produce movement and sense their environment.
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.
Abdi said biological systems were remarkable for combining movement, sensing and responses to external stimuli, and the question was whether an artificial structure could be designed and manufactured to reproduce some of those functions. He added that the team was not trying to copy something already existing in nature; by changing materials and geometry, it wanted to see whether properties not currently found naturally could be created.
The project focuses on piezoelectric materials, which can convert mechanical deformation into electrical energy and deform under an applied electric field. The university said existing high-performance piezoelectric materials are often stiff and brittle, while some of the most widely used contain lead, complicating the development of soft, flexible and more sustainable artificial muscles.
Abdi’s approach combines material composition with specially designed 3D printed cellular structures to reach the required properties while remaining soft and flexible. The combination is intended to address the trade-off between stiffness and flexibility in conventional piezoelectric materials.
He described the project as ambitious, noting that while soft robotics already attracts significant research, creating something that could begin to replicate the multiple functions of living muscle remained a major challenge. His ambition during the fellowship was to develop a prototype demonstrating what was possible and providing a foundation for further research.