Department of Bioengineering, School of Engineering and School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Sci Adv. 2020 Jan 29;6(5):eaaz3194. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz3194. eCollection 2020 Jan.
Artificial control of animal locomotion has the potential to simultaneously address longstanding challenges to actuation, control, and power requirements in soft robotics. Robotic manipulation of locomotion can also address previously inaccessible questions about organismal biology otherwise limited to observations of naturally occurring behaviors. Here, we present a biohybrid robot that uses onboard microelectronics to induce swimming in live jellyfish. Measurements demonstrate that propulsion can be substantially enhanced by driving body contractions at an optimal frequency range faster than natural behavior. Swimming speed can be enhanced nearly threefold, with only a twofold increase in metabolic expenditure of the animal and 10 mW of external power input to the microelectronics. Thus, this biohybrid robot uses 10 to 1000 times less external power per mass than other aquatic robots reported in literature. This capability can expand the performance envelope of biohybrid robots relative to natural animals for applications such as ocean monitoring.
人工控制动物运动有潜力同时解决软机器人在致动、控制和功率要求方面的长期挑战。机器人对运动的操纵也可以解决以前无法获得的关于生物体生物学的问题，否则这些问题只能通过观察自然发生的行为来解决。在这里，我们展示了一种使用板载微电子学诱导活体水母游动的生物混合机器人。测量结果表明，通过以比自然行为更快的最佳频率范围驱动身体收缩，可以显著提高推进力。游泳速度可以提高近三倍，而动物的代谢消耗仅增加两倍，并且微电子学的外部功率输入仅增加 10 毫瓦。因此，与文献中报道的其他水生机器人相比，这种生物混合机器人每质量消耗的外部功率少 10 到 1000 倍。这种能力可以扩展生物混合机器人相对于天然动物的性能范围，用于海洋监测等应用。
