# BeetleBot: beetle-sized soft robot with printed liquid crystal muscles walks, grips and senses touch

- Published: 2026-11-13 13:16 UTC
- Section: Machines & Making › Robots
- Tags: BeetleBot, soft robot, liquid crystal elastomer, artificial muscle, 3D printed actuators, strain sensor patch, gesture control, tactile sensing, Caltech, KAIST
- URL: https://realtech.media/news/rt-e84655145df8cda318fc0fbb_beetlebot_beetle_sized/

**Researchers from Caltech, KAIST and NTU Singapore built a laboratory prototype soft robot driven by printed muscles, with a camera, touch sensing and finger-gesture control.**

![BeetleBot: beetle-sized soft robot with printed liquid crystal muscles walks, grips and senses touch](https://realtech.media/media/2026/11/195f45b25d3af057.jpg)
*Earth.com*

A research team from Caltech, KAIST and NTU Singapore has described BeetleBot, a soft robot about the size of a beetle that walks, grips objects and reports what it senses, in Science Advances [1]. It is a laboratory prototype. Inho Kim built it as a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and is now an assistant professor of chemistry at Sungkyunkwan University. Sang Ouk Kim of KAIST and Wei Gao of Caltech led the study.

The legs and the gripper are driven by electrothermally actuated liquid crystal elastomer muscles, and a flexible circuit controls them independently. All functional components are made by additive manufacturing [1]. A camera on the head and a tactile sensor in the gripper send data back to the operator, who steers the robot with a wearable strain-sensing patch on one finger over a wireless link.

## Printed muscles modeled on a beetle

Each muscle is a printed stack of layers with a laser-cut metal heating wire inside. Current warms the elastomer, it contracts along the alignment of its molecules, and it lengthens again on cooling. At 3 V a free-standing muscle shortened by about 45% and returned to full length when the power stopped. Its maximum stress was 0.18 MPa, within the 0.1–0.35 MPa range given for mammalian skeletal muscle.

The muscle placement is based on measurements of leg-joint motion in the flower beetle Mecynorrhina torquata. On the robot's six legs, the front legs lift and lower the body, bending about 20 degrees, and the rear legs swing back and forth by about 12 degrees. Walking consists of these two groups firing in turn, and heating the muscles on one side only turns the robot [1].

## Touch sensing and gesture control

The gripper has two curved flaps that close when their muscles contract, with a capacitive pressure sensor on the gripping surface. The sensor registered a touch in 0.127 s, and its reading rose almost in step with pressure up to 50 kPa. A small sphere, a large sphere and a cube produced three different signals.

The control patch is a printed polymer strip with carbon nanotubes. Bending the finger stretches it and raises its resistance. Four finger movements gave four separable signals, read as forward, left, right and grip, and the patch kept its signal through 1,000 bending cycles. In a test, an operator guided the robot around an obstacle to a target object using the camera feed alone, in eight movements, then gripped and carried the object.

## Limits of the prototype

Full contraction requires the elastomer to exceed roughly 110°C, and surfaces on the robot passed 100°C during walking. A thermal camera showed the heat staying local to the working muscle. Each step waits for cooling, so the walking cycle is slower than the muscle's own limit, and added payload slowed it further. The patch signals pass through a wired front end before the wireless link, and the test course was a small built setup. KAIST said actuation speed, energy efficiency and power supply need further work.

## Sources

1. [Science Advances](https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeg8849)
2. [Earth.com](https://www.earth.com/science/a-tiny-remote-controlled-beetle-robot-named-beetlebot-uses-artificial-muscles-to-explore-narrow-spaces-and-grab-hidden-objects)

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Source: RealTech, realtech.media — https://realtech.media/news/rt-e84655145df8cda318fc0fbb_beetlebot_beetle_sized/