(Press-News.org) “In complex cross-media environments, existing attachment mechanisms face significant physical constraints,” said Junzhi Yu, corresponding author and Professor at Peking University. “Traditional suction cups easily fail underwater due to fluid washing, or they lose their vacuum seal on rough surfaces. We needed a unified mechanism that could break through the dual barriers of environmental media and surface morphology.”
To achieve this, the team looked to the lamprey. The ancient fish uses a soft lip to create a seal, a muscle pump to generate a vacuum, and a ring of horny teeth to physically interlock with a rough surface.
Replicating this biological masterpiece, the researchers designed a robotic suction disc that integrates a flexible silicone lip with a smart core made of a temperature-controlled Shape Memory Polymer (SMP).
The science behind it is both elegant and highly effective. When the built-in heater warms the SMP to just above 33 °C, the material softens into a rubbery state. As the vacuum activates, this softened material is sucked deep into the microscopic crevices and pores of the target surface, perfectly imprinting its texture. Once the heat is turned off, the SMP rapidly cools and hardens back into a rigid state, essentially locking itself into the surface like a custom-made key in a lock.
“This hybrid mechanism successfully decouples adhesion strength from continuous vacuum maintenance,” Yu explained. “Even if the external vacuum system fails, or if there is slight air leakage on extremely rough surfaces, the physical interlocking of the hardened SMP allows the device to maintain a highly secure grip for an ultra-long time.”
In laboratory tests, the results were striking. The compact device, weighing only 70 grams, generated enough pull-off force to stably lift heavy loads exceeding 850 times its own weight in both air and water. On highly rough surfaces where traditional pure-vacuum suction cups failed completely, the bio-inspired disc maintained its grip. Its effective adhesion time in the air was nearly tripled, while underwater retention time increased by up to 540%.
But the suction disc’s capabilities extend far beyond just lifting heavy weights; its true power lies in its extreme versatility across different scales and shapes. In dry tests, the device demonstrated an astonishing operational span, safely handling objects spanning six orders of magnitude in mass—from delicately picking up a fragile 0.01-gram microelectronic chip to robustly carrying an 11.4-kilogram desk. It seamlessly adapted to irregular everyday items and complex industrial tools like wrenches and hammers. Underwater, the system proved equally adaptable. It firmly gripped not only smooth metal coins but also highly irregular, naturally porous objects like red bricks, scallop shells, and large conches with complex three-dimensional curves.
To prove the system’s real-world versatility, the team conducted a highly challenging cross-media demonstration. A robotic arm equipped with the suction cup precisely grabbed a bionic manta ray robot in the air, submerged it entirely into a water tank, let it swim, and then successfully re-attached to the wet robot underwater to lift it back into the air.
“The system adapted flawlessly to the air-water interface transition,” said the researchers. “The application scenarios for this technology are vast. We envision this technology being deeply integrated into various robotic platforms, playing a crucial role in deep-sea resource exploration, marine engineering maintenance, and amphibious emergency rescue operations.”
Co-first authors of the paper are associate research fellow Lei Li and master student Wenzhuo Gao from the School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics at Peking University. Other contributors include Boyang Qin, Bo Wang, and Shihan Kong from the School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University; Yiyuan Zhang, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore; Changhong Linghu, City University of Hong Kong; and Yitian Ma, School of Mechatronical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology.
The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Beijing Nova Program, the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province, the National Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation supported this work.
About Dr. Junzhi Yu:
Junzhi Yu is a tenured full professor at Peking University and a Fellow of the IEEE. His research interests span intelligent robotics, motion control, and intelligent mechatronic systems. He has published extensively in leading journals, including Science Advances and IEEE Transactions on Robotics. His publications have garnered over 15,700 citations, with an h-index of 67.
Personal Homepage: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Gudfky4AAAAJ
END
Lamprey-inspired amphibious suction disc with hybrid adhesion mechanism
2026-03-10
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
A domain generalization method for EEG based on domain-invariant feature and data augmentation
2026-03-10
“Domain bias caused by individual differences and device variations severely limits BCI’s practical application, while existing methods struggle with feature decoupling and noise sensitivity,” explained study corresponding author Jing Jin from East China University of Science and Technology. The core innovations include (a) a fixed structure decoupler to separate category-related and independent features; (b) fine-grained patch coding and gated channel attention for spatiotemporal feature extraction; and (c) an Interclass Prototype Network (IPN) to enhance feature discriminability. “This hybrid approach enables the model to learn robust domain-invariant ...
Bionic wearable ECG with multimodal large language models: coherent temporal modeling for early ischemia warning and reperfusion risk stratification
2026-03-10
Myocardial ischemia, the primary driver of heart attacks, remains the leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Delays in diagnosis directly correlate with increased myocardial necrosis, higher complication rates, and elevated mortality. While traditional 12-lead ECG is the clinical gold standard for ischemia detection, its episodic nature fails to capture transient, unpredictable ischemic episodes during continuous ambulatory monitoring. Though wearable ECG devices have excelled at detecting arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation (with over 95% sensitivity), their utility ...
JMIR Publications partners with the University of Turku for unlimited OA publishing
2026-03-10
(TORONTO & TURKU, March 10, 2026) JMIR Publications, a leading open-access digital health research publisher, and the University of Turku (UTU) are pleased to announce a new Flat-Fee Unlimited Open Access Publishing Agreement.
This partnership, effective January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2026, replaces individual Article Processing Charges (APC) with an Institutional Publishing Fee (IPF) that covers all UTU affiliated researchers. JMIR’s institutional partnerships have a track record of successfully reducing administrative burden, eliminating ...
Strange cosmic burst from colliding galaxies shines light on heavy elements
2026-03-10
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A recently detected flash of energy appears to have emanated from the wreckage of colliding galaxies, according to an international team of astronomers led by Penn State scientists. The burst, known as GRB 230906A, was likely caused by the collision of two neutron stars hundreds of millions of years ago and is now shedding light on how the universe creates some of its heaviest elements.
The signal, first detected by the NASA Fermi satellite in September 2023, belonged to a peculiar class of short gamma-ray bursts, explosions ...
Press program now available for the world's largest physics meeting
2026-03-10
Next week, nearly 14,000 scientists from around the world will convene to share new research results from across physics at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit. The conference will be held in Denver and online everywhere March 15-20.
Press kit
Press releases, tip sheets, and other materials are now available in the Global Physics Summit digital press kit. Registered journalists and public information officers will also receive emails with information daily for the duration of the meeting.
Press room
In-person press registrants will have access to a press room (meeting room 608 in the Colorado Convention ...
New release: Wiley’s Mass Spectra of Designer Drugs 2026 expands coverage of emerging novel psychoactive substances
2026-03-10
HOBOKEN, NJ – Wiley, a global leader in authoritative content and research intelligence for the advancement of scientific discovery, innovation and learning, today announced the 2026 release of Mass Spectra of Designer Drugs, the essential GC‑MS spectral database used by forensic laboratories worldwide for the rapid identification of illicit substances.
As the landscape of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) continues to evolve—with growing numbers of synthetic cannabinoids, metabolites, fentanyl analogs, pharmaceutical drugs and metabolites, derivatives, ...
Exposure to life-limiting heat has soared around the planet
2026-03-10
Climate change since the 1950s has doubled the amount of time per year that millions of people around the world must endure heat so extreme that everyday physical activities cannot be done safely, a new study concludes.
“Most heat studies focus on how hot it feels. This one asks a different question: What can a human body safely do in that heat?” said co-author Jennifer Vanos, an associate professor at Arizona State University in the School of Sustainability.
An important goal of the research is to identify vulnerable populations ...
New AI agent could transform how scientists study weather and climate
2026-03-10
Computer scientists and weather scientists have taken the first steps toward creating an AI agent capable of analyzing and answering questions in natural language, such as English, about data from AI-driven weather and climate forecasting models.
The research team from the University of California San Diego will present the first AI weather agent they developed, named Zephyrus, at the 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) April 23–27 in Rio de Janeiro.
Recently, models driven by AI and deep learning have considerably improved weather forecasting. But analyzing the ...
New study sheds light on protein landscape crucial for plant life
2026-03-10
PULLMAN, Wash. — Research led by scientists at Washington State University has revealed insights on how plants form a microscopic landscape of proteins crucial to photosynthesis, the basis of Earth's food and energy chain.
The discovery provides a new view of the molecular engine that converts sunlight into bioenergy and could enable future fine-tuning of crops for higher yields and other useful traits.
Colleagues at WSU, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel used a novel, technology-powered approach to peer inside plant leaf cells and visualize the landscape of the photosynthetic membrane — the ribbon-like structure where plants ...
New study finds deep ocean microbes already prepared to tackle climate change
2026-03-10
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Deep-sea waters are warming due to heat waves and climate change, and it could spell trouble for the oceans’ delicate chemical and biological balance. A new study, however, demonstrates that the microbe Nitrosopumilus maritimus may already be adapting well to warmer, nutrient-poor waters. Researchers predict that these surprisingly adaptable iron-dependent ammonia-oxidizing archaea will play an important role in reshaping ocean-nutrient distribution in a changing climate.
The study’s findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nitrosopumilus ...