China Develops Robot That Can Shoot Like a Bullet at the Sight of Light
Scientists have created a bionic launcher technology that can be used in various ways, including deep tissue sampling, as a soft bullet or smart-seeding in agriculture. The innovative light-driven launch system is inspired by squirting cucumbers and allows miniature robots to move in fields such as medicine, agriculture, aerospace, and ballistics.
The soft hydrogel and graphene launcher releases energy in just 0.3 milliseconds, enabling the device to take off from both wet and dry surfaces and cover a distance 643 times its own body height. This technology can be used for developing miniature medicinal robots, smart-seeding agriculture robots, or as a soft bullet.
According to the researchers, “Robotic tasks that require robust propulsion abilities such as jumping, ejecting or catapulting require power-amplification strategies where kinetic energy is generated from pre-stored energy.” The G-hydrogel launcher, which measures 7mm in diameter and 3mm in thickness, can move over 1.93 meters vertically, exceeding the performance of current engineering miniature robot systems.
The launch system has potential applications in medicine for scenarios that require force output, such as deep tissue sampling, stent delivery, and tissue resection. The team is still testing the technology, which can be used to create untethered medical robots that need a high-force output to enter deep tissue.
Source: https://www.wionews.com/trending/china-develops-robot-which-can-shoot-like-a-bullet-at-the-sight-of-light-749199