A Power-Autonomous, Fully Edible Tensegrity Robot for Environmental Tasks and Emergency Sustenance

Tensegrity robots offer significant potential for disaster rescue and environmental monitoring. Traditional designs, however, rely on non-consumable electromechanical bodies that impose passive weight, reduce payload efficiency, and inevitably result in persistent electronic waste upon mission completion. To resolve this challenge, we propose a fully edible, power-autonomous, membrane-driven tensegrity robot that achieves a paradigm shift from a robot carrying food to a robot that is self-sustenance. The robot employs a stiff-compliant coupled architecture, utilizing food-grade cookies as compressive members and gelatin-based membranes as tensile elements. To enable electronics-free terrestrial locomotion, we integrated a fully edible pneumatic energy system that exploits the neutralization reaction between citric acid and sodium bicarbonate to generate carbon dioxide gas. This gas is modulated into pulsatile signals by a monostable fluidic logic valve, triggering out-of-plane expansion of the membrane surfaces. This expansion shifts the robot’s center of mass to induce a controllable rolling gait. Furthermore, the robot offers high metabolizable energy owing to its carbohydrate-rich composition (54.1 percent). To ensure biological safety, we conducted comprehensive evaluations ranging from in vitro simulated digestion to in vivo trials with live mice, confirming the system’s biocompatibility and metabolic integration. The proposed method provides a sustainable, zero-waste solution for wildlife vaccination, covert ecological monitoring, and autonomous emergency sustenance, effectively eliminating the ecological footprint of robotic deployment in sensitive environments. One-Sentence Summary A power-autonomous, fully edible tensegrity robot that shifts the paradigm from carrying food to being sustenance.