New soft robot navigates land and water with 3 advanced senses

Chinese researchers from Guangdong University of Technology and Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University have developed an innovative 8-milligram soft robot inspired by ants and whirligig beetles that can navigate both land and water. Unlike most existing soft robots that respond to a single environmental trigger and operate in only one environment, this new robot integrates three advanced sensory responses—temperature, humidity, and magnetic fields—through a multi-layered composite film acting as an artificial muscle. This design overcomes previous challenges of signal interference by keeping the robot’s different responses separate, enabling coherent adaptation across dynamic boundaries between water and land. The robot’s structure consists of a triple-layer “sandwich”: a polyimide film chemically modified to be sensitive to temperature and humidity, bonded to a silicone rubber layer embedded with magnetic particles. It achieves speeds up to 9.6 cm/s on water, comparable to actual whirligig beetles, and uses a strong rolling gait controlled by rotating magnetic fields to traverse various terrains, including slopes