Researchers Created A Robot That Can Liquify, Reform And Escape A Tiny Jail Cell: Now, They Are Optimistic About The Robot’s Use In Biomedical And Engineering Contexts

NDABCREATIVITY - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
NDABCREATIVITY - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only, not the actual person

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.

NDABCREATIVITY – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person

The team noticed that these echinoderms were able to switch between “soft” and “stiff” physical states in order to protect themselves and increase the amount of weight they could transport.

Now, the resulting robot is just three millimeters tall and one millimeter wide. However, much like a sea cucumber, the robot was found to be able to carry an object thirty times greater than its own mass while in solid form.

Then, to switch the robot to a liquified state, the researchers simply placed the robot near magnets.

Afterward, the magnets activated magnetic induction– which caused the robot’s magnets to vibrate, heat up, and form electric currents. Finally, this ultimately shifted the metal around the magnets while reaching its melting point.

And with the help of a magnetic field, the researchers found that the robot was able to climb walls, jump over moats, and split in half in order to cooperatively move other objects at once before coming back together.

Another impressive video showed the robot locked behind a grid with jail-like bars. It was able to easily escape, though, by liquefying, oozing through the grid, and remolding back into solid form on the outside.

Now, Pan detailed how he and his team are “pushing this material system in more practical ways” to help solve specific engineering and medical problems.

For instance, for biomedicine, the team was able to use the robots to remove a foreign object from a stomach model. Then, the robots delivered drugs on-demand to the same model stomach.

In terms of engineering, the team also demonstrated that the robot was able to work as a universal mechanical “screw” used for assembling parts in tough-to-reach spaces.

This was accomplished by the robot actually melting into the screw socket and solidifying on command.

No screws or actual “screwing” was even required.

Still, moving forward, Majidi is eager to continue exploring the use of these robots within biomedical contexts.

“What we are showing are just one-off demonstrations, proofs of concept. But, much more study will be required to delve into how this could actually be used for drug delivery or for removing foreign objects,” Majidi concluded.

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Katharina Buczek graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Journalism and a minor in Digital Arts. Specializing ... More about Katharina Buczek
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