Meisam Abdi, a researcher at De Montfort University Leicester in the UK, has received a 2026/27 Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to investigate whether 3D printing can produce artificial muscles for soft robots. He was 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.
Abdi said that if people are to interact safely with robots in settings such as hospitals, 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. His project therefore looks beyond conventional rigid machine parts.
Rather than reproducing 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 are to be modeled with computer-aided engineering, 3D printed and tested in the laboratory for their response to electrical stimulation.
Piezoelectric materials and softness
The project focuses on piezoelectric materials, which can convert mechanical deformation into electrical energy and deform under an applied electric field. According to DMU, 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. 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.
He said biological systems are remarkable because they combine movement, sensing and responses to external stimuli, and that the question for the project is whether an artificial structure can be designed and manufactured to reproduce some of those functions. The work is not intended to copy something that already exists in nature; instead, changing materials and geometry may create properties that do not currently exist naturally, he said.
Abdi described the project as ambitious. There is already significant research into soft robotics, but creating something that can begin to replicate the multiple functions of living muscle remains a major challenge. His ambition during the fellowship is to develop a prototype that demonstrates what is possible and can provide the foundation for further research.