Marangoni surfer robots look and move like water bugs

From birds successful the entity to food successful the sea, nature's creatures person characteristics people perfected implicit millennia. Studying them leads engineers to make caller technologies that are indispensable to our mode of beingness today. Mechanical engineers from Michigan Technological University stock however they built a tiny, self-powered robot inspired by water-skimming insects.

"Bio-inspired robotic technologies propulsion the boundaries of what we deliberation is imaginable erstwhile it comes to traveling connected land, successful the aerial and underwater," said Hassan Masoud, an adept of biologic and bio-inspired fluid mechanics astatine Michigan Tech. "Yet fewer robots absorption connected the air-water interface. Many biological organisms specified arsenic insects, arachnids and adjacent bacteria person the quality to basal upon this bound by taking vantage of aboveground tension."

However, among these species, lone a fewer tin besides manipulate aboveground hostility to propel themselves crossed the liquid aboveground with large velocity and maneuverability. Masoud and his team, including doctoral pupil Mitchel Timm, built a robot that tin bash this—and their enactment was precocious published successful Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

A Marangoni robot moves crossed the aboveground of water. Credit: Michigan Tech

They besides wrote a impermanent blog for Michigan Tech's Unscripted probe blog detailing however their robot uses Marangoni propulsion, a method of generating thrust by creating surface tension gradients.

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