Researchers have created humanoid, miniature robots that can change shape and transform into liquid.
This breakthrough could pave the way for the creation of more robots that can switch between liquid and solid, which could be used in a variety of situations.
The researchers demonstrated that one of the robots could transform into a liquid and escape from the small prison it was being held in.
In other demonstrations, the robots were able to jump over ditches, climb walls and split in two to move objects, work together and then reunite.
The robots are also magnetic and can be used to conduct electricity, which allows them to be controlled.
Scientists now hope to move beyond these demonstrations and find ways to actually make use of these robots.
“We are already trying to use this material system in a more practical way to solve some very specific medical and technical problems,” says Chengfeng Pan, an engineer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who led the study.
For example, the researchers tested using robots to remove a foreign object from an artificial stomach and then put medicine into it. The researchers showed that robots could also be used to infiltrate circuits to assemble and repair them, and do the same for hard-to-reach screws.
“Future work should shed more light on how these robots can be used in a biomedical context,” says Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University, who contributed to the study.
“What we showed were one-off demonstrations to prove the concept, but much more work is needed to explore how this could actually be used for drug delivery or the removal of foreign bodies.
The research is described in the paper “Magnetoactive Liquid-Solid Phase Transitional Matter” published in Matter.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech
