Fig. 6: The autonomous insect-scale soft swimmer and jumper.

a The autonomous soft swimmer. (i) Components of the robot, including a swimming joint, a battery, a control circuit, and buoyance components for flotation. (ii) The soft robot swims in lab environment. (iii) The swimming speeds of the robot correspond to different time ratios spent on the upstroke and downstroke phases with a flapping frequency of 1 Hz. (iv) The swimming speeds of the robot correspond to different flapping frequencies with the time ratio of 9:1, 1:1, and 1:9. b The autonomous soft robot swims on an open-field river surface with a speed of 24 mm/s at the flapping frequency of 0.67 Hz. c Directional swimming capability demonstration via integrating two independent coils in the robot. d The autonomous insect-scale soft jumper. (i) Components of the robot, including a jumping joint, a battery, and a control circuit. (ii) This untethered autonomous jumper demonstrates a unique capability of jumping multiple times on this length scale. The pictures are superimposed frames from Supplementary Video 11, and each frame is shifted left for a better illustration of the jumping motion. Source data for (a) are provided as a Source Data file.