Untethered Soft Microrobots with Adaptive Logic Gates

Integrating adaptative logic computation directly into soft microrobots is imperative for the next generation of intelligent soft microrobots as well as for the smart materials to move beyond stimulus-response relationships and toward the intelligent behaviors seen in biological systems. Acquiring adaptivity is coveted for soft microrobots that can adapt to implement different works and respond to different environments either passively or actively through human intervention like biological systems. Here, a novel and simple strategy for constructing untethered soft microrobots based on stimuli-responsive hydrogels that can switch logic gates according to the surrounding stimuli of environment is introduced. Different basic logic gates and combinational logic gates are integrated into a microrobot via a straightforward method. Importantly, two kinds of soft microrobots with adaptive logic gates are designed and fabricated, which can smartly switch logic operation between AND gate and OR gate under different surrounding environmental stimuli. Furthermore, a same magnetic microrobot with adaptive logic gate is used to capture and release the specified objects through the change of the surrounding environmental stimuli based on AND or OR logic gate. This work contributes an innovative strategy to integrate computation into small-scale untethered soft robots with adaptive logic gates.