All-around, real-time navigation and sensing across the water environments by miniature soft robotics are promising, for their merits of small size, high agility and good compliance to the unstructured surroundings. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a mantas-like soft aquatic robot which propels itself by flapping-fins using rolled dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) with bending motions. This robot exhibits fast-moving capabilities of swimming at 57mm/s or 1.25 body length per second (BL/s), skating on water surface at 64 mm/s (1.36 BL/s) and vertical ascending at 38mm/s (0.82 BL/s) at 1300 V, 17 Hz of the power supply. These results show the feasibility of adopting rolled DEAs for mesoscale aquatic robots with high motion performance in various water-related scenarios.

翻译：全向、实时跨水域环境导航与感知的微型软体机器人，因具备体积小、高灵活性和对非结构化环境良好适应性等优势而前景广阔。本文提出并验证了一种蝠鲼式软体水生机器人，其利用卷绕介电弹性体驱动器（DEAs）的弯曲运动驱动鳍状肢推进。该机器人在1300V、17Hz供电条件下，展现出快速运动能力：水下游泳速度达57mm/s（1.25倍体长/秒）、水面划行速度64mm/s（1.36倍体长/秒）、垂直上升速度38mm/s（0.82倍体长/秒）。研究结果表明，采用卷绕DEA构建中尺度水生机器人，可使其在多种涉水场景中实现高运动性能。