Research On The Bio-inspired Actuation Of Untethered Robot Based On Marangoni Effect

With the development of materials science,intelligent manufacturing and information technology,the application of traditional rigid robots is limited.Following the trend of artificial intelligence and man-machine interaction,close attention has been paid on the research of intelligent materials and remote-control strategy of bio-inspired robot in the robot industry.As for variable bio-mimetic soft robots,plenty of researchers have focused intense interests in untethered bio-inspired robot since it has pluses such as free of wire,flexible control strategies and so forth.Whereas,untethered bio-inspired robot is dependent on specific external requirements,materials failure and so on,which hinders its wide application.In the basis of Marangoni effect,we report an elegant-designed and agile untethered bio-inspired robot.The robot applies the actuation mode with separating the body and actuation module.Moreover,the motion of robot has been manipulated precisely and variable functional applications have been demonstrated.Remarkably,the maximum velocity of robot reaches 5.5 body length per second and is 7-fold of counterparts the best reported,0.69 body length per second.First of all,the simple manufacturing process of robot,actuating fuels as well as data collection and processing were introduced.Next,through analyzing the net force acted on robot according to traditional Marangoni-propulsion theory and collected data,the fact that robot was actuated by the induced surface tension gradient and chemical potential energy gradient was proved.Subsequently,the intact motion of robot and the factors affecting robot’s velocities and corresponding trends has been investigated.Besides,steering control and three maneuver modes have been illustrated in detail.In addition,motion at the interface of gasoline-water proves the diverse applicable environment of this robot.In the end,several interestingapplications have been presented,namely,carrying load,fixed-point triggering,invisible demonstration,contrast of noise intensity,robot swarm extinguishing a fire,which highlight the characteristics of robot namely,remarkable kinematics,precisely controllable motion,mild process,no material destruction,efficient collaboration.The bio-inspired untethered robot actuated by Marangoni effect proposed in this paper has enabled the untethered robot to become simple,efficient,highly-precisely controllable and moderate actuating process,which provides inspiration and reference for the design and application of future untethered bio-inspired robot.