Soft Tunable Gelatin Robot with Insect-like Claw for Grasping, Transportation, and Delivery

Abstract

Recently, insect-scale soft robots have received increasing attentions for diverse applications owing to their ability to access hard-to-reach areas. However, most of them are composed of non-degradable materials like PDMS and silicone rubbers, and such chemical inertness may become an obstacle for future clinical applications where tunable material properties or degradation abilities are required. Here, we present a small-scale soft robot from a magnetic gelatin hydrogel, whose mechanical properties can be easily tuned through one-step Hofmeister effected-assisted reaction. Moreover, the robot is designed with insect claw-like legged structure, allowing it to perform grasping and cargo transportation tasks as its non-degradable counterparts. The degradation and controlled delivery ability of the robot are also demonstrated to show the advantages of magnetic hydrogels over non-degradable polymers. Our study provides an alternative for the tunable and degradable millirobot construction with an effective manipulation ability and promotes the applications of millirobot in biomedical sceneries.

Asymmetric Soft‐Structure Functional Surface for Intelligent Liquids’ Distinction, Transportation, and Reaction Mixer

“…Further, we elucidate how underlying proceeding/pinning mechanisms form various liquid‐responsive behaviors and verify that the ASFS can be used as a controllable fluidic reactor or a portable liquid discriminator. This study enriches the research of functional operation surfaces, [ 38–41 ] and achieves better application‐oriented liquid control based on the intrinsic properties of liquids. [ 42,43 ]…”

Magnetic hydrogels with ordered structure for biomedical applications

“…Magnetic-field-induced assembly is a controllable and easy method for construction of magnetic ordered materials by arrangement of magnetic nanoparticles under magnetic field ( Shi et al, 2020a ). Here, orderly manufacturing-based construction is another strategy, including microfluidics and three-dimensional (3D) printing ( Daly et al, 2020 ; Cai et al, 2021 ; Yang et al, 2022b ). This strategy offers the ability to prepare microscale hydrogels and unique control over the fabrication of complex structures ( Zhang et al, 2021 ).…”

“…With the development of bionic science, more soft robots based on magnetic hydrogel were reported inspired by nature. For example, ( Yang et al, 2022b ), prepared a soft millirobot based on a magnetic hydrogel with a multilegged structure. The multilegged structure was inspired from the insect claw-like legged structure, which could perform motions, grasping and cargo transportation ( Figure 6 ).…”

“…Scale bar = 10 mm and 5 mm. [Reproduced with permission from ( Yang et al, 2022b ) Copyright 2022 American Chemical Society].…”

Natural Cilia and Pine Needles Combinedly Inspired Asymmetric Pillar Actuators for All-Space Liquid Transport and Self-Regulated Robotic Locomotion

“…The former can control the liquid transport with the help of asymmetric-structured characteristics, − e.g., curvature, gradient, and tilt (also including artificial asymmetric design , ); the latter, through the asymmetric cilia-like beating or coordination, can actively propel fluids toward the target direction . These bionic systems have shown great potential in microfluidic devices, − liquid transport/separation/collection, − self-cleaning, , and robotic technologies. − …”