A shape-shifting robot which is able to liquefy itself and then reform again looks like something out of the Terminator movies.
The impressive machine is able to escape a cage and then reform on the other side of the bars.
The team of engineers took the inspiration of sea cucumber to design the miniature robots.
As well as being able to shape-shift, they are magnetic and can conduct electricity.
Dr Chengfeng Pan, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said while traditional robots are hard-bodied and stiff, ‘soft’ robots are flexible but weak, and their movements are difficult to control.
‘Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid states endows them with more functionality,’ he said.
The team behind it created the robots by embedding magnetic particles in gallium, a metal with a very low melting point of 29.8 Celcius (85.6 Fahrenheit).
They tested the robots by making them jump over moats, climb walls, and even split in half to cooperatively move other objects around before coalescing back together.
The team also used the robots to remove a foreign object from a model stomach and to deliver drugs on-demand into the same stomach.
Senior author Professor Carmel Majidi, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, in Canada said: ‘The magnetic particles here have two roles.
‘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.
‘But the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the ability to move in response to the magnetic field.’
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