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Soft heat engines are poised to play a vital role in future soft robots dueto their easy integration into soft structures and low-voltage powerrequirements. Recent works have demonstrated soft heat engines relying onliquid-to-gas phase change materials. However, despite the fact that many softrobots have air as a primary component, soft air cycles are not a focus of thefield. In this paper, we develop theory for air-based soft heat engines designand efficiency, and demonstrate experimentally that efficiency can be improvedthrough careful cycle design. We compare a simple constant-load cycle to adesigned decreasing-load cycle, inspired by the Otto cycle. While bothefficiencies are relatively low, the Otto-like cycle improves efficiency by afactor of 11.3, demonstrating the promise of this approach. Our results lay thefoundation for the development of air-based soft heat engines as a new optionfor powering soft robots.

Thermodynamically-informed Air-based Soft Heat Engine Design