Microbot Mimics Water Strider, Can Walk & Jump On Water!

Water Striders have a truly unique ability to walk on water. Taking inspiration from it, a group of Chinese scientists have developed a bio-inspired agile microrobot that mimics a water strider to walk and continuously jump on water. The four colleagues Jie Zhao, Xinbin Zhang, Ning Chen and Qinmin Pan saw that the existing tiny bots could just walk on water; they couldn't leap. These microbot could move over lakes, but couldn't jump because the downward force needed to propel them into the air usually pushed their legs through the water's surface. Thus, taking it as a challenge, Pan's research group started work on developing a truly water-striding robot.

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Image courtesy of American Chemical Society

Much to the success of the team, they made a robot that can leap up to 5.5 inches or more with a weight that equals more than 1000 times that of an actual water strider. With the use of a porous, super water-repellant nickel foam, they created the three supporting and two jumping legs of their strider bot. The team reports that the robot could jump nearly 14 inches forward leaving the water at a speed of about 3.6 miles per hour. We looked up for a demo video, but couldn't find any. All that we are sure of is that this definitely is an era of the insect bots and we don't find them creepy anymore. What about you?

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