Katharina Buczek
Engineers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong have designed a remarkable miniature robot that can rapidly shift between liquid and solid states on command. All the while, the robot never loses any of its strength.
This new design was inspired by sea cucumbers and combined the critical aspects of two different kinds of robots– “stiff” robots, which are typically hard-bodied, and “soft” robots, which are flexible but difficult to control and weak.
According to Chengfeng Pan, the study’s leader, enabling robots to reversibly transform from solid to liquid states gives them more functionality.
This feat was accomplished once Pan’s team created a new phase-shifting material known as a “magnetoactive solid-liquid phase transitional machine.”
The material’s creation was completed via the embedding of magnetic particles in gallium– a metal that has a very low melting point of just 85.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Carmel Majidi, the study’s senior author and a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, explained how the magnetic particles play two distinct roles in the robot’s functionality.
“One is that they make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field, so you can, through induction, heat up the material and cause the phase change,” he said.
“But the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the ability to move in response to the magnetic field.”
The study, which has since been published in Matter, was inspired by the researchers’ observations of sea cucumbers.
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