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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A light-driven hydrogel launcher has been created by scientists, taking inspiration from squirting cucumber plants. Photo: Chinese University of Hong Kong

Published: 6:00pm, 11 Aug 2024Updated: 6:06pm, 11 Aug 2024

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.

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.

“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).

But existing methods relying on chemical or elastic energy such as latch-spring or buckling instability mechanisms can have limitations, Wang said, such as insufficient energy storage, long energy release periods and complicated fabrication.