Scientists have created a breakthrough in robotics: a shape-shifting robot that can switch between water and metal surfaces to navigate difficult environments without losing power.
Because they can be soft and hard, small robots, made of sea cucumbers can overcome the limitations of robots that are one or the other, and thus have the opportunity to provide important needs in areas such as electronic assembly and even medical applications. .
The researchers made the robots move awkwardly, remove or deliver items to the human stomach, and even pour water to escape the cage before changing its original shape.
“Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid water makes them more efficient,” says engineer Chengfeng Pan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in China.
There are many ways to use small robots that can navigate around spaces too small or cluttered for humans to control using conventional tools, from automated maintenance to targeted drug delivery. But hard robots aren’t the best for navigating confined spaces or tight corners, while soft, flexible robots are flimsy and difficult to control.
To find the discrepancy, a team of researchers led by Pan and his colleague, Qingyuan Wang of Sun Yat-sen University in China, turned to nature as a source of inspiration. Animals such as sea cucumbers can change the stiffness of their muscles to improve their load and reduce physical damage, while octopuses can change the stiffness of their arms for hiding, distraction, and locomotion.
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To create a robot that could do the same, the researchers needed a non-toxic material that could easily move between soft and hard surfaces at ambient temperatures. He turned to gallium, a soft metal that has a melting point of 29.76 degrees Celsius (85.57 degrees Fahrenheit) at standard temperatures – just a few degrees below human body temperature. You can melt gallium by holding it in your hand.
The researchers embedded a gallium matrix with magnets, creating what they call a “magnetoactive solid-liquid phase transitional machine”.
“Magnetic particles here have two roles,” said physicist Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University, one of the lead authors of the team’s paper.
“One is that they make the material interact with alternating magnetic fields, so you can, through induction, heat the material and cause a change in the phase. magnetic field.”
After testing to see if the transition from solid to liquid was reversible (it was), the researchers ran their small robots through a series of tests. The robots can jump over small tunnels, climb over obstacles, and even come apart to perform joint tasks and move objects before reassembling and reassembling.
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He also had a small humanoid model – shaped like a Lego figure – melt down to escape from a small prison, walking through bars and changing sides in homage to a scene from the Terminator 2 movie.
Next, the group looked for practical applications. They created a model of the human stomach, and they started the robot and removed a small object inside it – a useful method, for example, to remove swallowed batteries, for example – and then it did the same job, delivering the object along the way. the group hopes to be able to provide a cure.
To repair circuits, robots can walk and melt on circuits to act as conductors and solder; and even acting as a screw, penetrating into hard and solid metal, doing the work of a screw without someone needing to fix it.
For real world applications, the phase shift mechanism may need to be modified. For example, because the human body is higher than the melting point of pure gallium, a robot designed for biomedical use can have a gallium alloy matrix that can raise the melting point while still being functional.
This, the researchers say, should not be investigated in detail.
“Future work should explore how these robots can be used in medical applications,” says Majidi.
“What we’re showing is just a one-off, proof-of-concept, but more research will be needed to investigate how this can be used to deliver drugs or remove foreign substances.”
Research has been published in Story.
