Soft Robotic Engines with Non-Reciprocal Motion by Physical Intelligence.

ABSTRACT: Movement is essential for living systems, enabling access to food, habitats, or escape from threats. Across scales, a key unifying principle is symmetry breaking to achieve non-reciprocal motion and accumulate work. In soft robotics, many actuators mimic biological responsiveness, but they typically exhibit reciprocal motion, where forward work is canceled in the return stroke - preventing work accumulation in cyclic operation. Here, a simple and broadly applicable hydrogel engine concept is presented that overcomes this limitation by encoding kinetic asymmetry into swelling and deswelling transitions. This hard-coded asymmetry yields non-reciprocal motion trajectories, enabling continuous mechanical work extraction under a single, uniform stimulus - without complex external control. The s

SUBMITTER: Skarsetz O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12617052 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature