A Multidirectional Locomotion Light-Driven Soft Crawling Robot

Abstract

Soft robots based on bionics with multi-freedom and communication abilities have attracted extensive attention in recent years. However, the solutions for soft robots with multidirectional locomotion currently concentrate on complex drive modes and exhibit application unfriendliness. In this work, an untethered multidirectional locomotion light-driven soft crawling robot is proposed with the integration of communication module, which can traverse in four directions with a fixed near-infrared (NIR) light source and is also capable of positioning and perception. Owing to the photothermal response of graphene oxide and ingenious structural design, the critical states of robot deformation can be determined simply by controlling the duration of NIR light, ultimately resulting in different crawling directions. Furthermore, a communication module is integrated into the robot enabling the robot to locate and sense humidity by magnetic coupling. The proposed robot provides an innovative strategy for the design and integration of multidirectional locomotion soft crawling robots, showing great potential in intelligent robots.