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An Autonomous Subgram SMA-Based Swimmer

arXiv:2606.15028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Swima, a bioinspired 900-mg swimmer propelled by two 10-mg high-work-density (HWD) actuators driven by shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires. We integrated onboard power and computation by using a custom-built printed circuit board (PCB) and an 11-mAh 3.7-V 507-mg single-cell lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery, which in conjunction enable autonomous swimming in excess of 18 min. The Swima can swim at speeds of up to 22.4 mm/s (0.56 Bl/s), achiev

Published June 16, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2606.15028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Swima, a bioinspired 900-mg swimmer propelled by two 10-mg high-work-density (HWD) actuators driven by shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires. We integrated onboard power and computation by using a custom-built printed circuit board (PCB) and an 11-mAh 3.7-V 507-mg single-cell lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery, which in conjunction enable autonomous swimming in excess of 18 min. The Swima can swim at speeds of up to 22.4 mm/s (0.56 Bl/s), achieves turning rates of up to 14{\deg}/s, and can follow 0-degree heading reference trajectories with root mean square (RMS) values of tracking errors of about 6.5{\deg} across multiple tests. This robot is the first subgram microswimmer with onboard power, actuation, and computation developed to date.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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