Water-pumped hydrogel muscles make transparent soft robots that swim fast, kick balls, and catch a live fish while staying nearly invisible to eyes and sonar.
Soft robots still lag far behind living organisms in autonomy, self-repair and efficiency; copying biology's integrated sensing-actuation loops is the way to close the gap.
Simulated stress-testing of a needle-insertion surgical robot, paired with a digital twin, uncovered real software flaws and measurable gaps between virtual and physical behavior.
Computer-optimized muscle-and-scaffold designs made lab-grown muscle robots move up to eleven times further, enabling jumping, swimming, walking and gripping.
A free, open-source circuit board combines industrial 24 V water-quality sensors with motor control for marine robots, hitting 99.97% data reliability over 240 hours of testing.
A robot dog with a flexible, torque-amplifying spine timed to its legs runs faster and more efficiently than rigid-spine and rival flexible-spine designs.
Macrophages loaded with magnetic iron-platinum microrollers can be steered into solid tumors, where they trigger iron-driven cancer cell death and rally the immune system.
AI can inspect poultry carcasses and predict quality well in lab studies, but weak validation and plant-to-plant variation keep it from reliable commercial use.
Swallowable capsule robots can now steer magnetically, sample tissue, and deliver drugs inside the gut, but weak actuation, power, and navigation still block clinical use.
Thin, asymmetric hydrogel fibers respond to stimuli faster than bulk gels, and their internal architecture is what turns swelling into useful directional motion for soft robots.