Bioinspired underwater locomotion of light-driven liquid crystal gels
By Hamed Shahsavan, Amirreza Aghakhani, Hao Zeng, Yubing Guo, Z. Davidson, Arri Priimagi, Metin Sitti. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020
312 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance Untethered dynamic shape programming and control of soft materials have significant applications in technologies such as soft robots, medical devices, organ-on-a-chip, and optical devices. Here, we present a solution to remotely actuate and move soft materials underwater in a fast, efficient, and controlled manner using photoresponsive liquid crystal gels (LCGs). LCG constructs with engineered molecular alignment show a low and sharp phase-transition temperature and experience considerable density reduction by light exposure, thereby allowing rapid and reversible shape changes. We demonstrate different modes of underwater locomotion, such as crawling, walking, jumping, and swimming, by localized and time-varying illumination of LCGs. The diverse locomotion modes of smart LCGs can provide a new toolbox for designing efficient light-fueled soft robots in fluid-immersed media. Soft-bodied aquatic invertebrates, such as sea slugs and snails, are capable of diverse locomotion modes under water. Recapitulation of such multimodal aquatic locomotion in small-scale soft robots is challenging, due to difficulties in precise spatiotemporal control of deformations and inefficient underwater actuation of existing stimuli-responsive materials. Solving this challenge and devising efficient untethered manipulation of soft stimuli-responsive materials in the aquatic environment would significantly broaden their application potential in biomedical devices. We mimic locomotion modes common to sea invertebrates using monolithic liquid crystal gels (LCGs) with inherent light responsiveness and molecular anisotropy. We elicit diverse underwater locomotion modes, such as crawling, walking, jumping, and swimming, by local deformations induced by selective spatiotemporal light illumination. Our results underpin the pivotal role of the physicomechanical properties of LCGs in the realization of diverse modes of light-driven robotic underwater locomotion. We envisage that our results will introduce a toolbox for designing efficient untethered soft robots for fluidic environments.
Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0fb54dea7656363048b2521a2993b2aaacb1950
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In Condensed Matter Physics
In Mechanical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- The shape – morphing performance of magnetoactive soft materials (2021, background): “Smart materials are known for changing their one or more properties in a controlled fashion in the presence of external stimuli such as temperature [1,2], humidity [3,4], pH [5], electric field [6-9], magnetic field [10-16], and light [2,17-21].”