  All-around, real-time navigation and sensing across the water environments by
miniature soft robotics are promising, for their merits of small size, high
agility and good compliance to the unstructured surroundings. In this paper, we
propose and demonstrate a mantas-like soft aquatic robot which propels itself
by flapping-fins using rolled dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) with
bending motions. This robot exhibits fast-moving capabilities of swimming at
57mm/s or 1.25 body length per second (BL/s), skating on water surface at 64
mm/s (1.36 BL/s) and vertical ascending at 38mm/s (0.82 BL/s) at 1300 V, 17 Hz
of the power supply. These results show the feasibility of adopting rolled DEAs
for mesoscale aquatic robots with high motion performance in various
water-related scenarios.
