ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Elastic-instability-enabled locomotion.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Robotic ray driven by periodic ring snapping.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2025Article
- Exotic mechanical properties enabled by countersnapping instabilities.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Non-reciprocal multifarious self-organization.Nature nanotechnology · 2023Article
- Magnetohydrodynamic levitation for high-performance flexible pumps.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A low-cost wearable device for portable sequential compression therapy.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2022Article
- Patterned Electrode Assisted One-Step Fabrication of Biomimetic Morphing Hydrogels with Sophisticated Anisotropic Structures.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
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Abstract
Locomotion of an organism interacting with an environment is the consequence of a symmetry-breaking action in space-time. Here we show a minimal instantiation of this principle using a thin circular sheet, actuated symmetrically by a pneumatic source, using pressure to change shape nonlinearly via a spontaneous buckling instability. This leads to a polarized, bilaterally symmetric cone that can walk on land and swim in water. In either mode of locomotion, the emergence of shape asymmetry in the sheet leads to an asymmetric interaction with the environment that generates movement--via anisotropic friction on land, and via directed inertial forces in water. Scaling laws for the speed of the sheet of the actuator as a function of its size, shape, and the frequency of actuation are consistent with our observations. The presence of easily controllable reversible modes of buckling deformation further allows for a change in the direction of locomotion in open arenas and the ability to squeeze through confined environments--both of which we demonstrate using simple experiments. Our simple approach of harnessing elastic instabilities in soft structures to drive locomotion enables the design of novel shape-changing robots and other bioinspired machines at multiple scales.
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