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. The fellowship will support his work on whether additive manufacturing 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 intended to help robots move, sense and respond more like living organisms.
Abdi said safe interaction with robots 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 reproduce the physical structure of a human muscle, Abdi plans to use 3D printing to create architected structures whose geometry gives them specific properties. The project will model combinations of piezoelectric, conductive and structural materials and architectures using computer-aided engineering. The designs will then be 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. Abdi said biological systems are remarkable because they combine movement, sensing and responses to external stimuli. The question, he added, is whether an artificial structure can be designed and manufactured to reproduce some of those functions.
Abdi said the project is not an attempt to copy an existing natural structure. Instead, the aim is to investigate whether changing the materials and geometry of printed structures can create properties that do not currently exist in nature.
The work focuses on piezoelectric materials, which can convert mechanical deformation into electrical energy and deform when an electric field is applied. DMU said existing high-performance piezoelectric materials are often stiff and brittle, while some of the most widely used contain lead. Those characteristics complicate 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.
Abdi described the project as ambitious. He noted that soft robotics already attracts significant research, but creating something that can begin to replicate the multiple functions of living muscle remains a major challenge. During the fellowship, he aims to develop a prototype that demonstrates what is possible and provides a foundation for further research.