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Updated: Jun 20, 2026

Cardiac Muscle-cell Based Actuator and Self-stabilizing Biorobot - PART 1
Published on: July 11, 2017
Hydrogel muscles powering reconfigurable micro-metastructures with wide-spectrum programmability
Mingchao Zhang1, Aniket Pal1, Zhiqiang Zheng1
1Physical Intelligence Department, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany.
Abstract:
Stimuli-responsive geometric transformations endow metamaterials with dynamic properties and functionalities. However, using existing transformation mechanisms to program a single geometry to transform into diverse final configurations remains challenging, imposing crucial design restrictions on achieving versatile functionalities. Here, we present a programmable strategy for wide-spectrum reconfigurable micro-metastructures using linearly responsive transparent hydrogels as artificial muscles. Actuated by the hydrogel, the transformation of micro-metastructures arises from the collaborative buckling of their building blocks. Rationally designing the three-dimensional printing parameters and geometry features of the metastructures enables their locally isotropic or anisotropic deformation, allowing controllable wide-spectrum pattern transformation with programmable chirality and optical anisotropy. This reconfiguration mechanism can be applied to various materials with a wide range of mechanical properties. Our strategy enables a thermally reconfigurable printed metalattice with pixel-by-pixel mapping of different printing powers and angles for displaying or hiding complex information, providing opportunities for encryption, miniature robotics, photonics and phononics applications.
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