MIT BUILDS TRANSPARENT, GEL-BASED ROBOTS CAPABLE OF

EVADING UNDERWATER DETECTION

Transparent, gel-based robots that are capable of moving when water is

pumped in and out of them have been developed by engineers at MIT. The bots can carry out
several fast, forceful tasks, including catching and releasing a live fish and kicking a ball
underwater. The robots are made completely of hydrogel, a tough, rubbery, virtually
transparent material that mainly consists of water. Each robot is composed of hollow,
precisely engineered hydrogel structures, connected to rubbery tubes. The structures quickly
inflate in orientations when the researchers pump water into the hydrogel robots, enabling the
bots to stretch out or curl up.The team designed a number of hydrogel robots, including an
articulated appendage that mimics kicking motions, a finlike structure that flaps back and
forth, and a soft, hand-shaped robot that can squeeze and relax.

As the robots are both powered by and made almost totally of water,
they have similar acoustic and visual properties to water. The researchers suggest that these
robots, if engineered for underwater applications, could be nearly invisible.The team, headed
by Xuanhe Zhao, associate professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental
engineering at MIT, and graduate student Hyunwoo Yuk, is currently working towards
adapting hydrogel robots for medical applications.Zhao and Yuk have published their results
this week in the journal Nature Communications. Their co-authors include MIT graduate
students Shaoting Lin and Chu Ma, postdoc Mahdi Takaffoli, and associate professor of
mechanical engineering Nicholas X. Fang.
ROBOT RECIPE

In the last five years, Zhaos team has been developing recipes for
hydrogels, mixing solutions of water and polymers, using methods they invented to fabricate
strong yet highly stretchable materials. They have also developed methods to glue these
hydrogels to a variety of surfaces such as metal, glass, rubber, and ceramic forming highly
strong bonds that resist peeling.The team realized that such flexible, durable, strongly
bondable hydrogels are likely to be perfect materials for application in soft robotics. Various
research teams have designed soft robots from rubbers like silicones, but Zhao highlights that
such materials are not as biocompatible as hydrogels. As hydrogels mostly consist of water,
he says, they are naturally safer to use in a biomedical application. Although others have tried
to design robots using hydrogels, their solutions have resulted in fragile, comparatively
inflexible materials that burst or crack when used repeatedly.

FAST AND FORCEFUL

The team first drew inspiration from the animal world in order to apply their
hydrogel materials to soft robotics. They focused closely on glass eels (leptocephali) -
miniature, transparent, hydrogel-like eel larvae that hatch in the ocean and in due course
migrate to their natural river environments.To achieve that, Yuk and Zhao utilized 3D
printing and laser cutting methods to print their hydrogel recipes into robotic structures and
other hollow units, which they bonded to tiny, rubbery tubes that are connected to outer
pumps.To activate or move the structures, the team used syringe pumps to inject water via the
hollow structures, enabling them to swiftly stretch or curl, based on the total configuration of
the robots.Yuk and Zhao discovered that by pumping water in, they could create fast, forceful
reactions, enabling a hydrogel robot to produce a few Newtons of force in just one second.
Other researchers were able to activate similar hydrogel robots using simple osmosis,
allowing water to naturally seep into structures a slow process that generates millinewton
forces in a span of several minutes or hours.

CATCH AND RELEASE

In experiments utilizing many hydrogel robot designs, the team discovered

that the structures could endure repeated use of up to 1,000 cycles without tearing or
rupturing. They also discovered that each design, placed underwater against colored
backgrounds, appeared almost fully camouflaged.The team measured the optical and acoustic
properties of the hydrogel robots, and found them to be almost equal to that of water, in
contrast to rubber and other widely used materials in soft robotics.In a remarkable
demonstration of the technology, the team built a hand-like robotic gripper and pumped water
in and out of its fingers, which caused the hand to close and open. The researchers
submerged the gripper into a tank containing a goldfish and demonstrated that as the fish
swam past, the gripper was strong and fast enough to catch the fish.Going forward, the
researchers hope to identify specific applications for hydrogel robotics, as well as customize
their recipes to specific uses. For instance, medical applications might not need totally
transparent structures, while other applications may require some parts of a robot to be stiffer
than others.This research received supported, in part, from the Office of Naval Research, the
MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the National Science Foundation.