Fig. 7. Navigating the soft robot inside the Eustachian tube phantom with diverse cross-sectional geometries and sizes filled with a shear-thinning fluid using its four different locomotion modes.
(A) Anatomical model of the human ear. The red dashed box indicates the Eustachian tube that is mimicked by the simplified phantom. (B) The robot can adapt to the local environmental constraints and conditions of the phantom by changing its locomotion mode to helical surface crawling, undulatory swimming, undulatory crawling, and rolling. The red arrows indicate the direction of . Scale bar, 5 mm. (C) The schematic of the diverse cross-sectional geometries and sizes in this phantom. Photo Credits: Ziyu Ren, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.