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. 2017 Aug 23;7:9197. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-08777-2

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Comparison between current artificial-muscle-based robotic systems and the proposed bioinspired systems enabled by molecular-level control signal amplification. (a) Conventional robotic system. While the use of multiple soft artificial muscles for robotic actuation can lead to both a large range of motion and high performance (specific power, safety, selective recruitment, redundancy, morphological computation etc.), such an arrangement requires the use of many hard and bulky external switches or valves, incompatible with both the properties of the soft artificial muscles and those of future bioinspired robotic systems. (b) Proposed molecular-level-controlled robotic system. The deficiency of current systems is addressed in this study through the development of a molecular-level approach to control signal amplification. (c) Detail of investigated system: (1) light generates an acid, (2) which triggers an acid autocatalytic reaction, (3) resulting in the contraction of a pH-responsive soft artificial muscle. Such an approach enables the development of biomimetic robots containing thousands of individually addressable soft artificial muscles, controlled with the smallest of inputs transmitted through embedded fibre optics and the individual artificial muscle fibres.