ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
A soft microrobot with highly deformable 3D actuators for climbing and transitioning complex surfaces.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Enhanced Acoustic Adhesion Enabling Agile and Small Wall-Climbing Robot Design With Anisotropic Origami Structure.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Physical Anchoring-Assisted Mechanically Guided Assembly for Material-Independent 3D Mesostructures.Small (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2026Article
- Musculoskeletal actuators with programmable morphology and tunable dynamics.Science advances · 2026Article
- A thin robot made of flexible electronics for in-situ machining and inspection of large structures.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Hierarchical laser-programmed soft actuators for designing bionic robots with freeform morphing shapes.Science advances · 2026Article
- Switchable adhesion of phase-transition eutectogels with integrated machine learning-enhanced intelligent adhesion sensing.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Bioinspired milliscale near-boundary undulatory motion for fluid transport and adhesive locomotion.Science advances · 2026Article
- Dual-Laser Optical Tweezers for Photothermal Analysis of Hybrid Microgels.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- A general soft robotic controller inspired by neuronal structural and plastic synapses that adapts to diverse arms, tasks, and perturbations.Science advances · 2026Article
- Strong and Agile Wall-Climbing Robots Capable of Traversing Obstacles via Anisotropic Acoustic Adhesion.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Magnetically actuated momentum-driven millirobots.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Light-driven micro/nanobots.Nanophotonics (Berlin, Germany) · 2025Review
- SPARC: A Soft, Proprioceptive, Agile Robot for 3D Climbing and Exploration with Precise Trajectory Following.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Ultrasound-driven programmable artificial muscles.Nature · 2025Article
- Thermally Actuated Soft Robotics.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2025Review
- Programmable and Reversible 3D-to-3D Shape Transformation: Hierarchical Multimodal Morphing Based on Liquid Crystal Elastomers.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Rapid moving by liquid-amplified electrostatic rolling.Science advances · 2025Article
- Phase transitions perception in nonreciprocal mechanical metamaterials through electromagnetic resonance.Science advances · 2025Article
- FromMaterials today. Bio · 2025Review
- Multifunctional Ionene Liquid Crystal Elastomers.ACS applied materials & interfaces · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The climbing microrobots have attracted growing attention due to their promising applications in exploration and monitoring of complex, unstructured environments. Soft climbing microrobots based on muscle-like actuators could offer excellent flexibility, adaptability, and mechanical robustness. Despite the remarkable progress in this area, the development of soft microrobots capable of climbing on flat/curved surfaces and transitioning between two different surfaces remains elusive, especially in open spaces. In this study, we address these challenges by developing voltage-driven soft small-scale actuators with customized 3D configurations and active stiffness adjusting. Combination of programmed strain distributions in liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) and buckling-driven 3D assembly, guided by mechanics modeling, allows for voltage-driven, complex 3D-to-3D shape morphing (bending angle > 200°) at millimeter scales (from 1 to 10 mm), which is unachievable previously. These soft actuators enable development of morphable electroadhesive footpads that can conform to different curved surfaces and stiffness-variable smart joints that allow different locomotion gaits in a single microrobot. By integrating such morphable footpads and smart joints with a deformable body, we report a multigait, soft microrobot (length from 6 to 90 mm, and mass from 0.2 to 3 g) capable of climbing on surfaces with diverse shapes (e.g., flat plane, cylinder, wavy surface, wedge-shaped groove, and sphere) and transitioning between two distinct surfaces. We demonstrate that the microrobot could navigate from one surface to another, recording two corresponding ceilings when carrying an integrated microcamera. The developed soft microrobot can also flip over a barrier, survive extreme compression, and climb bamboo and leaf.
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