Stenus-inspired, swift, and agile untethered insect-scale soft propulsors

Ke, Xingxing; Yong, Haochen; Xu, Fukang; Ding, Han; Wu, Zhigang

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-45997-3

Cited by 10 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Magnetic soft robots, composed of flexible polymers and embedded magnetic particles, offer superior mechanical compliance when compared with traditional rigid robots. The torque and forces from these particles enable swift, reversible movements and a broad range of motion, allowing the robots to dynamically adapt to various external environmental factors. − These robots can be precisely controlled by manipulating their internal magnetic domains, facilitating diverse and reversible deformation modes. This adaptability is particularly beneficial for remote navigation in challenging settings such as space, oceanic depths, and intricate enclosures, where it can substantially improve the operational safety. − Consequently, magnetic soft robots are being increasingly applied to diverse fields, including bionics, biomedicine, micromachines, and flexible electronics. − …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhanced Magnetic Soft Robotics: Integrating Fiber Optics and 3D Printing for Rapid Actuation and Precision Sensing

Han,

Gao,

Wang

2024

ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Timely, accurate, and rapid grasping of dynamic change information in magnetic actuation soft robots is essential for advancing their evolution toward intelligent, integrated, and multifunctional systems. However, existing magnetic-actuation soft robots lack effective functions for integrating sensing and actuation. Herein, we demonstrate the integration of distributed fiber optics technology with advanced-programming 3D printing techniques. This integration provides our soft robots unique capabilities such as integrated sensing, precise shape reconstruction, controlled deformation, and sophisticated magnetic navigation. By utilizing an improved magneto-mechanical coupling model and an advanced inversion algorithm, we successfully achieved real-time reconstruction of complex structures, such as ‘V’, ‘N’, and ‘M’ shapes and gripper designs, with a notable response time of 34 ms. Additionally, our robots demonstrate proficiency in magnetic navigation and closed-loop deformation control, making them ideal for operation in confined or obscured environments. This work thus provides a transformative strategy to meet unmet demands in the rapidly growing field of soft robotics, especially in establishing the theoretical and technological foundation for constructing digitized robots.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhanced Magnetic Soft Robotics: Integrating Fiber Optics and 3D Printing for Rapid Actuation and Precision Sensing

Han,

Gao,

Wang

2024

ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Annelids‐Inspired Modular Design of Multi‐Modal Deformation for Magnetic Soft Robots

Nong,

Sun,

Sun

et al. 2024

Adv Funct Materials

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Magnetic‐responsive soft materials have found extensive applications in biomedicine, robotics, and bionics. They can achieve complex deformations through structural design, magnetization patterns, and driving magnetic fields. However, due to the infinite degrees of freedom in soft materials, more efficient design methods for magnetic soft materials need to be explored. Here, a multimodal unit programming method is proposed for designing hard magnetic soft materials. The structure of the multimodal units is inspired by the segmented structure of earthworms. By altering the combination of single‐tube units, the dual‐tube units exhibit specific deformation modes. This approach simplifies the complex deformation of magnetic soft materials into the single deformations of units, enabling facile programming design of magnetic soft materials. The application of different deformation modes is demonstrated in various scenarios and scale down the units to one‐tenth of their original size for operations at different scales. This further uncovering the potential of magnetic soft materials and providing ideas for their efficient design.

show abstract

Tailoring Stress–Strain Curves of Flexible Snapping Mechanical Metamaterial for On‐Demand Mechanical Responses via Data‐Driven Inverse Design

Chai,

Zong,

Yong

et al. 2024

Advanced Materials

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

By incorporating soft materials into the architecture, flexible mechanical metamaterials enable promising applications, e.g., energy modulation, and shape morphing, with a well‐controllable mechanical response, but suffer from spatial and temporal programmability towards higher‐level mechanical intelligence. One feasible solution is to introduce snapping structures and then tune their responses by accurately tailoring the stress–strain curves. However, owing to the strongly coupled nonlinearity of structural deformation and material constitutive model, it is difficult to deduce their stress–strain curves using conventional ways. Here, a machine learning pipeline is trained with the finite element analysis data that considers those strongly coupled nonlinearities to accurately tailor the stress–strain curves of snapping metamaterialfor on‐demand mechanical response with an accuracy of 97.41%, conforming well to experiment. Utilizing the established approach, the energy absorption efficiency of the snapping‐metamaterial‐based device can be tuned within the accessible range to realize different rebound heights of a falling ball, and soft actuators can be spatially and temporally programmed to achieve synchronous and sequential actuation with a single energy input. Purely relying on structure designs, the accurately tailored metamaterials increase the devices’ tunability/programmability. Such an approach can potentially extend to similar nonlinear scenarios towards predictable or intelligent mechanical responses.

show abstract

Stenus-inspired, swift, and agile untethered insect-scale soft propulsors

Cited by 10 publications

References 37 publications

Enhanced Magnetic Soft Robotics: Integrating Fiber Optics and 3D Printing for Rapid Actuation and Precision Sensing

Enhanced Magnetic Soft Robotics: Integrating Fiber Optics and 3D Printing for Rapid Actuation and Precision Sensing

Annelids‐Inspired Modular Design of Multi‐Modal Deformation for Magnetic Soft Robots

Tailoring Stress–Strain Curves of Flexible Snapping Mechanical Metamaterial for On‐Demand Mechanical Responses via Data‐Driven Inverse Design

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About