How to make a cylinder roll uphill

Abstract

Slithering, crawling, slipping, and gliding are various modes of limbless locomotion that have been mimicked for micro-manipulation of soft, slender and sessile objects. A lesser known mode is rolling which involves periodic, asymmetric and lateral muscular deformations. Here we enable an elastomeric cylinder of poly(dimethylsiloxane) to roll on a substrate by releasing a small quantity of a solvent like chloroform, toluene, hexane, heptane and so on, which swells differentially a portion of the cylinder, but evaporates from the portion of it which remains exposed to the atmosphere. In a dynamic situation, this asymmetric swelling–shrinking cycle generates a torque which drives the cylinder to roll. The driving torque is strong enough that the cylinder can roll up an inclined plane, within a range of inclination, its velocity even increases. The cylinder can even drag a dead weight significantly larger, ∼8 to 10 times its own weight. A scaling law is derived for optimizing the rolling velocity.