A silicone frog built by engineers at Denmark’s Aarhus University can’t swim nearly as fast as its amphibian inspiration, but it still manages to get the job done without any moving parts. The odd invention owes its slow-but-steady aquatic maneuvering to a set of six artificial muscles specially designed to contract when exposed to near-infrared light.
The team’s novel system is detailed in a study recently published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies. Although similar setups may one day boost the capabilities of soft robots tasked with search and rescue or environmental monitoring, its creators are a bit more realistic about this frog-bot’s near-term uses.
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