Many real-world applications for robots—such as long-term aerial and underwater observation, cross-medium operations, and marine life surveys—require robots with the ability to move between the air-water boundary. Here, we describe an aerial-aquatic hitchhiking robot that is self-contained for flying, swimming, and attaching to surfaces in both air and water and that can seamlessly move between the two. We describe this robot’s redundant, hydrostatically enhanced hitchhiking device, inspired by the morphology of a remora (
Echeneis naucrates
) disc, which works in both air and water. As with the biological remora disc, this device has separate lamellar compartments for redundant sealing, which enables the robot to achieve adhesion and hitchhike with only partial disc attachment. The self-contained, rotor-based aerial-aquatic robot, which has passively morphing propellers that unfold in the air and fold underwater, can cross the air-water boundary in 0.35 second. The robot can perform rapid attachment and detachment on challenging surfaces both in air and under water, including curved, rough, incomplete, and biofouling surfaces, and achieve long-duration adhesion with minimal oscillation. We also show that the robot can attach to and hitchhike on moving surfaces. In field tests, we show that the robot can record video in both media and move objects across the air/water boundary in a mountain stream and the ocean. We envision that this study can pave the way for future robots with autonomous biological detection, monitoring, and tracking capabilities in a wide variety of aerial-aquatic environments.
Based on spin-orbit charge transfer intersystem crossing mechanism, two heavy-atom-free photosensitizers (PSs) BDP1/BDP2 with absorption maxima at 506 nm/660 nm were constructed for photodynamic therapy (PDT). The long triplet state lifetimes and large singlet oxygen quantum yields, coupled with the mitochondria-targeted feature, made them highly phototoxic toward cancer cells. Moreover, the PDT-promoted cell apoptosis could be monitored by an obvious fluorescence off-on response of the two PSs due to the concomitant activation of extensive mitophagy, thus facilitating timely therapeutic feedback to avoid underor over-treatment. Importantly, such design allows the activatable PSs Glu-BDP1/Glu-BDP2 to be fabricated by attaching γ-glutamyl, a substrate of γ-glutamyltranspeptidase, to the alkoxyaniline unit of BDP1/BDP2, and their ability in either selectively killing cancer cells over normal cells or in ablating implanted tumour without damage to healthy tissue was demonstrated.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.