ETH Zurich researchers jointly designed living muscle tissue and soft scaffolds to build small robots that jump, walk, swim and grasp, with up to eleven times the movement of comparable earlier actuators.
The Soft Robotics Lab combined mouse muscle cells with 3D-printed hydrogel scaffolds, optimising both together in simulation. The roughly 1.5-centimetre actuators lifted themselves five millimetres and walked at 6.2 millimetres per second. The reported movement improvement compares systems with similar amounts of muscle tissue.
These remain laboratory demonstrations: the tissue needs nutrient solution, and larger robots would require a way to supply oxygen and remove waste. ETH announced the work on 22 October; the Nature Communications paper was published on 11 September 2026.