Bioinspired Synergy Strategies Empower Small-Scale Robots with Higher Performance

Small-scale robots need to be agile to perform various tasks in complex environments and the design faces great challenges with limited size and power consumption. However, the advent of advanced functional materials, compliant structures/mechanisms, and flexible fabrication techniques has brought new evolution directions to robotics. These technologies enrich the robots' actuation strategies, improving their performance of small robots while simplifying the complexity of the system and thus making it possible to be applied in diverse scenarios, such as disaster rescue, medical, and environmental exploration. In nature, small organisms have shown numerous efficient survival strategies. They can easily achieve locomotion tasks with low energy consumption. For example, dragonflies complete long flights with the help of wind, and stenus (one kind of rove beetle) uses the surface tension of liquids to dodge prey quickly. Insects are usually considered to be agile, efficient, and intelligent, which is the same requirement as for small robots. Yet the corresponding bioinspired design strategies bring new opportunities and challenges to the development of small-scale robots. Herein, the development trends of small-scale robots are analyzed and discussed, and several potential bioinspired synergy strategies are induced, which may be useful for the future design of insect-level soft robots.

Automated summary

Small-scale robots face great challenges in design due to limited size and power consumption, but the development of advanced functional materials, compliant structures/mechanisms, and flexible fabrication techniques bring new opportunities. These technologies improve the performance of small robots, simplify system complexity, and enable their application in diverse scenarios. Inspired by efficient survival strategies of small organisms, bioinspired design strategies offer new directions and challenges for small-scale robot development. This article analyzes the development trends of small-scale robots and induces potential bioinspired synergy strategies for future insect-level soft robot design.