China develops robot which can shoot like a bullet at the sight of light

A light-driven launch system has been created by Chinese scientists for miniature robots, taking inspiration from squirting cucumbers. This robot can be used in the fields of medicine, agriculture, aerospace and even ballistics.

The soft hydrogel and graphene launcher of the team is able to release energy in just 0.3 milliseconds, which helps the device take off from both wet and dry surfaces and cover a distance that is 643 times its own body height, the South China Morning Post reported.

This technology can help develop miniaturemedicinalrobots as smart-seedingagriculture robots. They can also be used for deep-tissue sampling, and carry the potential of getting used like a soft bullet.

“Robotic tasksthat require robust propulsion abilities such as jumping, ejecting or catapulting require power-amplification strategies where kinetic energy is generated from pre-stored energy,” stated the researchers in a paper which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Materials.

“Such devices typically need the energy release over short time durations,” for producing an adequate driving force, said lead author Wang Xin, who is a doctoral student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Wang said that the existing methods, which depend on chemical or elastic energy, can have limitations like complicated fabrication, long energy release periods and insufficient energy storage.

“Here we report an engineered accumulated strain energy-fracture power-amplification method that is inspired by the pressurised fluidic squirting mechanism ofEcballium elaterium,” said the team in the paper, while speaking about squirting cucumber plants.

All about G-hydrogel launcher’

The G-hydrogel launcher’ is small and has the shape of a disk. Its diameter is just 7mm (0.27 inches) and has a thickness of 3mm, however, it can move more than 1.93 (6.33 feet) metres vertically, according to the researchers.

Wang said that the motion performance of the G-hydrogel launcher exceeded “all the current engineering miniature robot systems with jumping/launching motions”.

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“The power amplification strategy may be applied tomedical robotsfor scenarios that require force output, such as deep tissue sampling, stent delivery and [deployment], tissue resection [and more],” he added.

The launch system is still being tested by the team and can be used for creating untethered medical robots which need a high-force output to enter deep tissue.

(With inputs from agencies)