Meisam Abdi, a researcher at De Montfort University Leicester, has won a 2026/27 Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for work on 3D-printed artificial muscles for soft robots. He is one of eight engineers in the UK to receive the award, which supports up to a year of research into materials and structures that could help robots move, sense and respond more like living organisms.
The project starts from a safety concern: Abdi said safe interaction in places such as hospitals requires moving away from completely rigid structures and considering how robots can be given attributes found in living systems.
Rather than trying to replicate the physical structure of a human muscle, Abdi plans to use additive manufacturing to create architected structures whose geometry gives them specific properties. Different combinations of piezoelectric, conductive and structural materials and architectures will be modeled using computer-aided engineering, 3D printed and tested in the laboratory for response to electrical stimulation.
The work will combine computer-aided design with physical experiments: material and architecture combinations are to be modeled before printing, and the printed structures will then be tested in the lab for their response to electrical stimulation. The project is not intended to reproduce a natural muscle in full; it will test whether engineered materials and geometry can deliver useful functions.
Piezoelectric materials and soft robotics
Piezoelectric materials 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 development of soft, flexible and more sustainable artificial muscles.
Abdi's approach combines material composition with specially designed 3D-printed cellular structures to reach 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.
Prototype is the fellowship target
Abdi described the work as ambitious. He said soft robotics already has significant research activity, 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.
He also framed the project as an attempt to create properties that do not currently exist naturally, rather than copying an existing biological structure. By changing materials and geometry, the team hopes to explore whether artificial structures can reproduce some of the functions that biological systems combine: movement, sensing and response to external stimuli.