A 1mm-thick miniatured mobile soft robot with mechanosensation and multimodal locomotion

The miniature soft robots have many promising applications, including micro-manipulations, endoscopy, and microsurgery, etc. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to fabricate a miniatured robot device that is thin, flexible, and can perform multimodal locomotor mobility with sensory capacity. In this study, we propose a miniatured, multi-layer (two shape memory polymer layers, a flexible copper heater, a silk particle enhanced actuator layer, and a sensory layer) four-limb soft robot (0.45-gram, 35 mm-long, 12 mm-wide) with a total thickness of 1 mm. A precise flip-assembling technique is utilized to integrate multiple functional layers (fabricated by soft lithography, laser micromachining technologies). The actuator layer's elastic modulus increased ∼100% by mixing with 20% silk particles by weight, which enhanced the mechanical properties of the miniature soft robot. We demonstrate that the soft robot can perform underwater crawling and jumping-gliding locomotion. The sensing data depicts the robot's multiple bending configurations after the sensory data been processed by the microprocessor mounted on the robot torso. The miniatured soft robot can also be reshaped to a soft miniatured gripper. The proposed miniatured soft robots can be helpful for studying soft organisms’ body locomotion as well as medical applications in the future.