Hydraulic hydrogel actuators and robots optically and sonically camouflaged in water
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Abstract
Sea animals such as leptocephali develop tissues and organs composed of active transparent hydrogels to achieve agile motions and natural camouflage in water. Hydrogel-based actuators that can imitate the capabilities of leptocephali will enable new applications in diverse fields. However, existing hydrogel actuators, mostly osmotic-driven, are intrinsically low-speed and/or low-force; and their camouflage capabilities have not been explored. Here we show that hydraulic actuations of hydrogels with designed structures and properties can give soft actuators and robots that are high-speed, high-force, and optically and sonically camouflaged in water. The hydrogel actuators and robots can maintain their robustness and functionality over multiple cycles of actuations, owing to the anti-fatigue property of the hydrogel under moderate stresses. We further demonstrate that the agile and transparent hydrogel actuators and robots perform extraordinary functions including swimming, kicking rubber-balls and even catching a live fish in water.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Topic
- Micro and Nano Robotics
- Field
- Physics and Astronomy
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Office of Naval ResearchNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMultidisciplinary University Research InitiativeCharles Stark Draper LaboratorySamsungDivision of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing InnovationNational Science Foundation
- Keywords
- Self-healing hydrogelsActuatorCamouflageRobotComputer scienceMaterials scienceRobustness (evolution)BiomimeticsNanotechnologyArtificial intelligenceChemistry
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes