Chameleon-Inspired Structural-Color Actuators

In response to the changing environment, chameleons can adjust their skin colors to communicate and create disguise during locomotions. By mimicking their behaviors, we present structural-color actuators that can sense the environment and give responses of non-fatigued vivid color alterations and programmable shape transformations. Due to the sensitive vapochromic and robust vapomechanical response properties, these structural-color actuators exhibit fast color changes (less than 1 s) and non-fatigued shape transformations (more than 110 cycles) when exposed to specific vapors. On the basis of these extraordinary properties, we demonstrate the actuation processes of a rotating pinwheel and a closing/blooming flower with brilliant color changes, and a worm-like structural-color walker that can move forward straight and rhythmically with dynamic color changes. With these chameleon-like behaviors, these structural-color actuators could have important implications in sensing, communication, and disguise of soft robotics.