Key Laboratory of Marine Materials and Related Technologies, Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Marine Materials and Protective Technologies, Ningbo Institute of Material Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ningbo 315201, China.
Yaoting Xue
Department of Engineering Mechanics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
College of Chemical Engineering, Ningbo Polytechnic, Ningbo 315800, China.
Yuming Yang
Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education Ministry of China, Key Laboratory of Clinical Evaluation Technology for Medical Device of Zhejiang Province, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
Xuxu Yang
Department of Engineering Mechanics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
Wei Lu
Key Laboratory of Marine Materials and Related Technologies, Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Marine Materials and Protective Technologies, Ningbo Institute of Material Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ningbo 315201, China.
Yinfei Zheng
Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education Ministry of China, Key Laboratory of Clinical Evaluation Technology for Medical Device of Zhejiang Province, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
Tao Chen
Key Laboratory of Marine Materials and Related Technologies, Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Marine Materials and Protective Technologies, Ningbo Institute of Material Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ningbo 315201, China.
Natural locomotion such as walking, crawling, and swimming relies on spatially controlled deformation of soft tissues, which could allow efficient interaction with the external environment. As one of the ideal candidates for biomimetic materials, hydrogels can exhibit versatile bionic morphings. However, it remains an enormous challenge to transfer these in situ deformations to locomotion, particularly above complex terrains. Herein, inspired by the crawling mode of inchworms, an isotropic hydrogel with thermoresponsiveness could evolve to an anisotropic hydrogel actuator via interfacial diffusion polymerization, further evolving to multisection structure and exhibiting adaptive deformation with diverse degrees of freedom. Therefore, a dynamic mortise-and-tenon interlock could be generated through the interaction between the self-deformation of the hydrogel actuator and rough terrains, inducing continual multidimensional locomotion on various artificial rough substrates and natural sandy terrain. Interestingly, benefiting from the powerful mechanical energy transfer capability, the crawlable hydrogel actuators could also be utilized as hydrogel motors to activate static cargos to overstep complex terrains, which exhibit the potential application of a biomimetic mechanical discoloration device. Therefore, we believe that this design principle and control strategy may be of potential interest to the field of deformable materials, soft robots, and biomimetic devices.
