Han Jie, Dong Xiaoguang, Yin Zhen, Zhang Shuaizhong, Li Meng, Zheng Zhiqiang, Ugurlu Musab Cagri, Jiang Weitao, Liu Hongzhong, Sitti Metin
Physical Intelligence Department, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany.
State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, 710054 Xi'an, China.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2023 Oct 17;120(42):e2308301120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2308301120. Epub 2023 Oct 4.
Artificial cilia integrating both actuation and sensing functions allow simultaneously sensing environmental properties and manipulating fluids in situ, which are promising for environment monitoring and fluidic applications. However, existing artificial cilia have limited ability to sense environmental cues in fluid flows that have versatile information encoded. This limits their potential to work in complex and dynamic fluid-filled environments. Here, we propose a generic actuation-enhanced sensing mechanism to sense complex environmental cues through the active interaction between artificial cilia and the surrounding fluidic environments. The proposed mechanism is based on fluid-cilia interaction by integrating soft robotic artificial cilia with flexible sensors. With a machine learning-based approach, complex environmental cues such as liquid viscosity, environment boundaries, and distributed fluid flows of a wide range of velocities can be sensed, which is beyond the capability of existing artificial cilia. As a proof of concept, we implement this mechanism on magnetically actuated cilia with integrated laser-induced graphene-based sensors and demonstrate sensing fluid apparent viscosity, environment boundaries, and fluid flow speed with a reconfigurable sensitivity and range. The same principle could be potentially applied to other soft robotic systems integrating other actuation and sensing modalities for diverse environmental and fluidic applications.
集成了驱动和传感功能的人造纤毛能够同时原位感知环境特性并操控流体,这在环境监测和流体应用方面具有广阔前景。然而,现有的人造纤毛在感知具有多种编码信息的流体流动中的环境线索方面能力有限。这限制了它们在复杂且动态的充满流体的环境中工作的潜力。在此,我们提出一种通用的驱动增强传感机制,通过人造纤毛与周围流体环境之间的主动相互作用来感知复杂的环境线索。所提出的机制基于将软机器人人造纤毛与柔性传感器相结合的流体 - 纤毛相互作用。通过基于机器学习的方法,可以感知诸如液体粘度、环境边界以及各种速度的分布式流体流动等复杂环境线索,这是现有的人造纤毛所无法做到的。作为概念验证,我们在集成了基于激光诱导石墨烯传感器的磁驱动纤毛上实现了该机制,并展示了以可重构的灵敏度和范围感知流体表观粘度、环境边界和流体流速的能力。相同的原理可能潜在地应用于其他集成了其他驱动和传感方式的软机器人系统,以用于各种环境和流体应用。