Untethered soft microrobot driven by a single actuator for agile navigations.

ABSTRACT: Cockroaches are renowned for their ability to swiftly navigate through tight spaces and robustly withstand high impacts due to their well-controlled locomotion and highly flexible exoskeletons. It has been a long-standing challenge to replicate these features in untethered controllable microrobots (weighing~1 g). Here, we show that a single actuator is used to tune a microrobot's leg strokes for controllable movements in various directions (forward, backward, and diagonal). Weighing just over 1 g and measuring 2 cm in length, the untethered microrobot achieves a forward speed of 4.8 body lengths per second (BL/s) and a turning speed of 280 deg/s, resulting in an outstanding maneuverability that has only previously been achieved in multiply-actuated microrobots. The untethered microrobot ca

SUBMITTER: Wu Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12289970 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature