Hydraulic hydrogel actuators and robots optically and sonically camouflaged in water

By Hyunwoo Yuk, Shaoting Lin, Chu Ma, M. Takaffoli, N. Fang, Xuanhe Zhao. Nature Communications, 2017

859 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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. Hydrogel actuators have been widely developed to be osmotic-driven but many are in fact only capable of producing low forces. Here, the authors developed high speed and high force hydrogel actuators capable of camouflage optically and sonically with low fatigue over multiple cycles.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00d04471945f08a07d00875261efc423beb2e950

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. J. Lewis
2. Chiara Daraio
3. Katia Bertoldi
4. Michael Thomas Tolley
5. Zhigang Suo

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Shengqiang Cai
2. J. Lewis
3. Zhigang Suo
4. Tongqing Lu
5. Ahmad Rafsanjani
6. Jingda Tang
7. Chiara Daraio
8. Jian Hu

Citations in the corpus

• Translucent soft robots driven by frameless fluid electrode dielectric elastomer actuators (2018, background): “As a comparison,wemeasured the transmittance in the abdomen of a leptocephalus that uses translucency for camouflage (32).”
• Soft Robotics: A Review of Recent Developments of Pneumatic Soft Actuators (2020, background): “Fortunately, there have been advancements in the use of “hydrogels” to mimic the way that a real-life counterpart would move in nature [105,106].”