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Watch this robotic manta ray speed through the water | Science
"Building a robot is easy. Building a robot with soft, bendable parts is still doable. But building a soft robot “fish” that can swim as well as the real thing: a much trickier task. But now, a team of scientists in China has gotten much closer, creating a robotic fish that can swim twice as fast as the next best bot of its kind....
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But engineer Tiefeng Li of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, wanted to give it a go anyway. So he came up with a counterintuitive solution: Use the surrounding water itself as part of the bot's electrical circuitry—specifically as a 'ground electrode' whose voltage stays constant while that on another electrode inside varies. People assumed that electricity leaking into the water would be dangerous for the researchers and anything near the bot. It turns out that water doesn’t conduct electricity well enough for that to be an issue."
"Building a robot is easy. Building a robot with soft, bendable parts is still doable. But building a soft robot “fish” that can swim as well as the real thing: a much trickier task. But now, a team of scientists in China has gotten much closer, creating a robotic fish that can swim twice as fast as the next best bot of its kind....
...
But engineer Tiefeng Li of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, wanted to give it a go anyway. So he came up with a counterintuitive solution: Use the surrounding water itself as part of the bot's electrical circuitry—specifically as a 'ground electrode' whose voltage stays constant while that on another electrode inside varies. People assumed that electricity leaking into the water would be dangerous for the researchers and anything near the bot. It turns out that water doesn’t conduct electricity well enough for that to be an issue."