Research progress of water strider in bionic characteristic and engineering application

Abstract

The water strider is a small insect in lakes, ponds, and wetlands, which can stand stably on water because of the excellent superhydrophobic property of legs that comes from the composite micro-nano structure. This feature has attracted numerous studies and become a research hopspot gradually. Scholars have conducted the investigation on the locomotion characteristic of water strider in order to acquire design inspirations to develop superhydrophobic surface and bionic water strider robots. Starting from the locomotion characteristic of water strider, this paper summarized the testing methods of water strider′s locomotion force, and focused on the development of superhydrophobic surface preparation and water walking or jumping robots in the engineering bionic field. The preparation of superhydrophobic surface should be lucubrated in the aspects of micro-morphological characteristic, preparation process and production cost, and the development of bionic strider robots needs to be considered in terms of the motion, driving mode and supporting characteristic. It will be the main trend in the future to develop superhydrophobic surface with remarkable and lasting efficacy and bionic water strider robots with excellent performance, complete function and highly similar motion characteristic, based on the micro-morphological structure characteristic of water strider leg.

Keywords

• bionics; water strider; contact force; locomotion characteristic; superhydrophobic surface; bionic water strider robot