Janus Magnetoelastic Membrane Swimmers

Soft swimming microrobots have attracted considerable attentions due to their potentials in diverse fields from microswitches to biomedicines and cargo transports. The locomotion control is of importance to the research of micromachines and microrobots. Herein, inspired by the motility strategies of living microorganisms, such as flagella, cilia, and euglenoid, we focus on the design and propulsion mechanisms of Janus magnetoelastic membrane swimmers. Superparamagnetic particles are uniformly distributed on the surface of hemispheres. We study the reversible morphological transitions of closed Janus magnetoelastic shells in response to varying magnetic dipole-dipole interactions. Due to the competition between the magnetic field induced dipoles with the elasticity of the membranes, we observe cyclic non-reciprocal buckled shapes that are accompanied with locomotion. Interestingly, our results show that the characteristics of the propulsion motions is significantly dependent on the temporal patterns of the magnetic dipole-dipole interactions as well as the variations in the elasticity of the hemispheres.