Nanowerk  October 8, 2024 Despite recent advances in the field of small-scale robots, the development of efficient, untethered, and integrated powering, actuation, and control of small-scale robots remains a challenge due to the out-of-equilibrium and dissipative nature of the driving physical and chemical phenomena. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Michigan, Canada) designed small-scale, bioinspired aquatic locomotors with programmable deterministic trajectories that integrated self-propelled chemical motors and photoresponsive shape-morphing structures. They developed robots integrating structural protein networks that self-regulated the release of chemical fuel with photochemical liquid crystal network (LCN) actuators that changed their shape and deformed […]