Abstract
Many creatures have the ability to traverse challenging environments by using their active muscles with anisotropic structures as the motors in a highly coordinated fashion. However, most artificial robots require multiple independently activated actuators to achieve similar purposes. Here we report a hydrogel-based, biomimetic soft robot capable of multimodal locomotion fueled and steered by light irradiation. A muscle-like poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) nanocomposite hydrogel is prepared by electrical orientation of nanosheets and subsequent gelation. Patterned anisotropic hydrogels are fabricated by multi-step electrical orientation and photolithographic polymerization, affording programmed deformations. Under light irradiation, the gold-nanoparticle-incorporated hydrogels undergo concurrent fast isochoric deformation and rapid increase in friction against a hydrophobic substrate. Versatile motion gaits including crawling, walking, and turning with controllable directions are realized in the soft robots by dynamic synergy of localized shape-changing and friction manipulation under spatiotemporal light stimuli. The principle and strategy should merit designing of continuum soft robots with biomimetic mechanisms.
Highlights
Many creatures have the ability to traverse challenging environments by using their active muscles with anisotropic structures as the motors in a highly coordinated fashion
After incorporating gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), this hydrogel showed earthworm-like peristaltic crawling in a confined glass tube upon periodic light irradiation, which resulted in radial contraction and longitudinal extension of the cylindrical gel and different contact with the tube for translational motion[30]
The multi-domain mesophase can be aligned by mechanical shearing (Supplementary Fig. 2); the correlation between orientation and birefringence under a polarizing optical microscope (POM) provides a simple way to characterize the alignment of NSs33
Summary
Many creatures have the ability to traverse challenging environments by using their active muscles with anisotropic structures as the motors in a highly coordinated fashion. Versatile motion gaits including crawling, walking, and turning with controllable directions are realized in the soft robots by dynamic synergy of localized shape-changing and friction manipulation under spatiotemporal light stimuli. Worms rely on single or multiple muscular hydrostats, and accomplish crawling by coupled radial contraction and axial elongation of the body[2] Inspired by these biological paradigms, researchers have developed myriad soft actuators based on soft active materials[4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Muscle-like hydrogels with anisotropic structure and fast response should favor the programmed deformation/locomotion of the soft robots, the material design has been a longstanding challenge. We envision that the approach to fabricate soft materials with ordered structures and the strategy to realize locomotion by asymmetric actuation are applicable to other systems and may facilitate versatile design of soft robots
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