A shape shifting robot
A shape shifting robot can flip between the states of liquid and metal has been developed by scientists as a breakthrough in robotics that allows it to negotiate challenging situation without sacrificing strength.
The tiny, sea cucumber-inspired rotos have the potential to be more useful in fields like electronics assembly and even medical applications since they can be both soft and hard, overcoming the constrains of robots that can only be one or the other.
In addition to navigating obstacle courses and removing or delivering things to a replica of the human stomach, researchers even had the robots liquefy to escape a prison before reforming back into their former humanoid shape.
Engineer Chengfeng Pan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong claims that giving robots the capacity to flip between liquid and solid states will increase their functionality.
A shape shifting robot’s usage
Small robots that can manoeuvre through spaces that are too small or complicated for people to handle with normal equipment have a variety of possible applications, from precise repair work to focused medicine administration.
But soft, more flexible robots tend to be weaker and more challenging to operate, while hard materials aren’t the ideal for negotiating restricted area or tight angles.
A team of academics lead by Pan and his colleagues Quinyuan Wang of Sun Yat-sen University in China looked to nature for inspiration in order to reach a compromise.
Octopuses may modify the rigidity of their limbs for camouflage, item handling, and motility, whereas animals like se cucumbers can modify the stiffness of their tissues to enhance load capacity and reduce physical damage.
Gallium for a shape shifting robot
The researchers wanted a non toxic material that can readily transition between soft and stiff states in ambient temperature in order to develop a robot that can do comparable tasks.
They used gallium, a soft metal with a melting point of just a few degrees below a melting point of just a few degrees below the normal body temperature under standard pressure of 29.76 degrees Celsius. Gallium may be melted just by being held in your hand.
The scientists built a “magneto active solid liquid phase transitional machine” by embedding magnetic particles in a gallium matrix. According to mechanical engineer Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Melon University, one of the paper’s senior authors, “The magnetic particles here have two jobs.”
One is that they make the material sensitive to an alternating magnetic field, allowing you to heat the material and induce a phase transition by induction. But the robots’ movement and the capacity to respond to the magnetic field are also provided by the magnetic particles.
The researchers put their tiny robots through a series of rests after checking to see if the change from slid to liquid could be reversed. The robots could traverse tiny moats, scale walls, and even divide into many units to work together to move things before recombining and resolidifying.
In a nod to a sequence from the film Terminator 2, they even had a little humanoid version, formed like a Lego figure, melt to escape a tiny jail cell, seeping through the bars and reforming on the other side.
The team then looked towards actual applications. They built a replica of a human stomach and used the robot to ingest and remove a small object from it – handy method, one could surmise, to extract ingested batteries – before performing the opposite operation, delivering an object the way the team believe it may administer medications.
The robots could locate damaged circuits, melt onto them to serve as a conductor and a solder, and even serve as a fastener by seeping into threaded screw without requiring human assistance to secure then in place.
The phase-transitional machine would need various adjustments for practical usage. For instance, a biomedical robot may contain a gallium-based alloy matrix that would boost the melting point while keeping functioning because the human body is higher than the melting point of pure gallium.
The researchers claim that it still needs further investigation. Further research should investigate how these robots may be employed in a biomedical setting.
What we’re demonstrating are simply one-off demonstrations, proofs of concept, and much more research will be needed for medicine administration or for eliminating foreign things, the researchers say.
Source: Smithsonian magazine
