Researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes the shape and even changed between fixed and “liquid” conditions-a concept that should be familiar to anyone who is still haunted by nightmares of the nightmares T-1000 robot assassins From “Terminator 2.”
A team under the direction of Matthew Devlin by UC Santa Barbara described this work in A newspaper that was recently published in ScienceWrite that the vision of “coherent collectives of robot units that can organize in practically any form with physical properties fascinated both science and fiction.”
Otger Campàs, professor at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biology and Genetics, said Ars Technica That the team was inspired by handkerchiefs in embryos to design robots with similar functions. These robots have motorized gears with which you can move within the collective, so that you remain attached, and photo detectors with which you can get instructions from a flashlight with a polarization filter.
Campàs said that the reality was “far from the Terminator thing”, with the remaining size and power challenges present. The researchers’ robots had a diameter of a little more than 5 centimeters, although the goal is to bring them to 1 or 2 centimeters or even smaller.
