Powered by muscle cells, a paper-thin robot swims through watery maze

What happened

But as MIT engineers have found, even a single layer of muscle cells can power through water if designed right. MIT engineers’ new aquabot offers a way to design small, efficient “biohybrid” robots.

Swimming can take a lot of muscle. In a paper appearing today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials , the team presents a design for a thin, muscle-powered swimming robot.

The “skeleton” of the aquabot is made from a film of gel that is about the length and width of a stick of gum. The two halves of the gel form the “fins” of the bot.