Liquid metal-enabled biomimetic robotics and robotic system

Advances in liquid metal (LM) soft matter science hold great potential for soft robotics, especially liquid metal-based biomimetic robotics and robotic system, due to these representative characteristics of high conductivity, excellent fluidity and solid-liquid phase transition capability, etc. In this chapter, we firstly introduce the concept of bionics and the development potential of LM to design soft robotics by taking fully advantage of their unique properties. Furthermore, the development history of LM in soft machines and robots is summarized, and the deformation and movement as well as the control mechanism of liquid metal are introduced, which provides principle supports for the design of LM-enabled robots. Researchers have developed a variety of LM-based animal-inspired bio-robots which can be applied in three different environments: ground, underwater, and air. Meanwhile, different types of LM bionic animal robots are introduced in detail from the aspects of material design, structure construction, and application scenarios. More importantly, scientists think about the nature of life from human himself and natural creatures, and put forward the basic elements - liquid environment of soft biomimetic robots. Typically, scientists start with basic LM biomimetic tissues or organs in order to establish LM-enabled human-inspired soft bio-robots. At the end of this chapter, scientists put forward the final vision of the LM-based biomimetic robotics, which is to design a soft robot system similar to Terminator robot, with the features of flexibility, self-driven, and controllable deformation capabilities, so as to better serve human production and life.