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Chinese-led team creates a squirting bot that can shoot like a bullet when it meets light
- Bionic launcher technology could have multiple uses including deep tissue sampling, smart-seeding in agriculture or even as a soft bullet
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Scientists have developed a light-driven launch system for miniature robots inspired by squirting cucumbers, a development that could have applications in medicine, agriculture, aerospace – and even ballistics.
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The team’s soft hydrogel and graphene launcher can release energy in just 0.3 milliseconds, allowing the device to rapidly take off from both wet and dry surfaces and travel a distance 643 times its own body height.
It could be used to develop miniature medicinal robots for deep tissue sampling, smart-seeding agriculture robots, and it could even have the potential to be used like a soft bullet.
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“Robotic tasks that require robust propulsion abilities such as jumping, ejecting or catapulting require power-amplification strategies where kinetic energy is generated from pre-stored energy,” the researchers from China and the United States said in a paper published last month in peer-reviewed journal Nature Materials.
“Such devices typically need the energy release over short time durations,” in order to produce an adequate driving force, said lead author Wang Xin, a doctoral student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
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