Design of a bipedal robot for water running based on a six-linkage mechanism inspired by basilisk lizards.

Legged robots have received widespread attention in academia and engineering owing to their excellent terrain adaptability. However, most legged robots can only adapt to high-hardness environments instead of flexible environments. Expanding the motion range of legged robots to water is a promising but challenging work. Inspired by basilisk lizards which can run on water surfaces by feet, this paper proposes a bipedal robot for water running by hydrodynamics instead of buoyancy. According to the motion parameters of the basilisk lizard during water running, a single-degree of freedom bipedal mechanism is proposed to reproduce the motion trajectory of the feet of the basilisk lizard. Scale optimization is conducted by a particle swarm optimization algorithm to determine the geometrical parameters of the mechanism. The effects of motion frequency and foot area on mechanism performance are studied and the optimal solutions are determined by the maximum single-cycle lift impulse through numerical calculations. A bipedal water running robot prototype was fabricated, and the experimental results show that the prototype can generate enough support for the robot running on the water by providing a maximum lift of 2.4 times its weight (160 g) and reaching a horizontal forward speed range of 0.3-0.8 m s-1, compared with the basilisk lizard weighs 2-200 g, generates a lift impulse that is 111%-225% of its body weight, and moves at a speed of 1.3 ± 0.1 m s-1.

Ruthenium-Catalyzed Meta-Selective Trifluoroisopropylation of Arenes.

This work reports the mild and efficient Ru-catalyzed trifluoroisopropylation of arenes using 2-bromo-1,1,1-trifluoropropane. Various bioactive molecules, such as purine and nucleoside derivatives, were well-suited for this transformation, affording the corresponding products in moderate-to-good yields. This method provides an efficient strategy for synthesizing trifluoroisopropyl molecules for drug discovery.

Iridium-Catalyzed Ortho-Selective C-H Borylation of Aryl Ketones with Transient Imine Ligands.

Ortho-selective C-H borylation of aromatic ketones has not been extensively explored. Herein, we report the iridium-catalyzed ortho-selective C-H borylation of aromatic ketones using in situ-formed imine as the ligand. Good compatibility is observed for various substituted acetophenones and other aromatic ketones, and corresponding products are obtained with medium to excellent yields.