Researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes shape and even changes between solid and “fluid” states, a concept that should be familiar to anyone who is still persecuted by the nightmares of the T-1000 robotic murderer of “Terminator 2”
A team led by Matthew Devlin of UC Santa Barbara described this work in An article recently published in ScienceWriting that the vision of “cohesive groups of robotic units that can be organized in virtually any form with any physical property … has long intrigued science and fiction.”
Otger Campàs, professor at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular and Genetic Biology, He told Ars Technica That the team was inspired by embryos fabrics to try to design robots with similar capacities. These robots have motorized gears that allow them to move inside the collective, magnets so that they can remain connected and photodetector that allow them to receive instructions from a flashlight with a polarization filter.
Campàs said that reality remains “far from the Terminator thing”, with the remaining size and power challenges. Researchers’ robots were just over 5 centimeters in diameter, although the goal is to reduce them to 1 or 2 centimeters, or even smaller.