Elastomers grow into actuators.

It is common knowledge that when an elastomer (rubber) is stretched, its length will maintain if its two ends are fixed. Here, we serendipitously find that an elastomer slowly elongated further to achieve buckling under such conditions, whose final length is much longer than the pre-stretched length. This allows to design untethered autonomous synthetic material-based soft robots that do not need any other chemical or electrical energy sources or external stimuli after the pre-strain is installed. Once the growth starts, the elongation continues to proceed even when the applied force is removed. Moreover, the elastomer after growing eventually forms a robust soft actuator which can be reshaped for different purposes. Few synthetic materials can grow like this so far. Our investigation shows that the material has an uncommon liquid crystal phase. Contrary to normal liquid crystals, it becomes birefringent only at high temperatures. The formation and the reshaping of the resulting soft actuators relate to a usually unnoticed reversible reaction. The work is promised to promote further understanding of dynamic covalent chemistry and liquid crystal elastomers, as well as to foster new designs and high-impact applications of bio-inspired sustainable soft actuators in areas other than soft robots. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.