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  4. Dead Matter, Living Machines: Repurposing Crustaceans' Abdomen Exoskeleton for Bio‐Hybrid Robots
 
research article

Dead Matter, Living Machines: Repurposing Crustaceans' Abdomen Exoskeleton for Bio‐Hybrid Robots

Kim, Sareum  
•
Gilday, Kieran  
•
Hughes, Josie  
November 26, 2025
Advanced Science

Bio‐hybrid robots utilize living organisms for robot design, however, their use of living bodies makes maintenance, control, and fabrication of robot challenging. As an alternative, exoskeletons stand out for retaining mobility after the organism's death, making them an accessible candidate. In particular, crustacean exoskeletons, often discarded as food waste, provide both structural strength and flexibility from their segmented rigid shell. By repurposing dead animals' part from bio‐waste, a sustainable cyclic design process is proposed in which materials can be recycled and adapted for new tasks after a robot's lifespan. In this paper, a bio‐hybrid robot design using the langoustine abdominal exoskeleton as a bending actuator is introduced. Through integration with synthetic components, augmented exoskeletons can generate diverse, fast, and robust motions with extended operational lifetimes. Three robotic applications are demonstrated using a 3 g exoskeleton capable of supporting a 680 g payload: a manipulator handling objects up to 500 g, fingers that grasp various objects and bend at speeds up to 8 Hz, and a swimming robot at speeds up to 11 cm s −1 . The method offers a sustainable robot design scheme and can be extended to diverse scales and functionalities by exploring a wide range of repurposable exoskeletons from bio‐waste.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1002/advs.202517712
Author(s)
Kim, Sareum  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Gilday, Kieran  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Hughes, Josie  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-11-26

Publisher

Wiley

Published in
Advanced Science
Article Number

e17712

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
CREATE-LAB  
Available on Infoscience
December 1, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/256490
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