Sometimes science advances at a snail’s pace, and in this case it’s a good thing. Researchers have created a squishy material that combines polymers and liquid metals and demonstrated it in a snail-like robot. Developers say the conductive gel could be used to create self-repairing electronic circuits and biological monitors to measure heart and muscle activity, and could even lead to a robot’s nervous system. I’m here.
Composite materials are elastic and soft like living tissue. If broken or torn, the edges can touch each other and the material’s molecular bonds quickly reform without additional heat or chemical treatment. And importantly, its creators say it’s the first material that also conducts electricity.
These features could lead to wireless medical monitors and completely soft robots. “One of the things that is very important to my research is, ‘How do you combine multiple functions into a single material?’ I developed soft robotic components as part of my research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Existing soft-body robots often require at least some rigid metal and silicon components, she said, but soft and flexible living tissue requires multiple Muscles move our body and provide electrical feedback about that movement to our brain.
To build the multitasking artificial matter, the researchers start with tangles of long polymer chains soaked in solvent to keep them flexible, then carefully add microscopic droplets of gallium-indium liquid metal and tiny silver flakes. mixed into This creates a low-density gel interspersed with conductive metals, through which enough electricity flows to power the motor.
In recent research nature electronics, researchers used the new material to connect the motors of two basic machines, a snail-like soft robot and a toy car, to power sources. It could withstand wear and tear and be easily reconfigured. For example, the team cut the gel “wires” that carry the car’s power and moved those connections to power both movement and a small chassis-mounted light.
The snail “shows the potential for using these materials, essentially as artificial neural tissue for soft robots,” said lead author Carmel Majidi, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University. I’m here. But a truly versatile bot requires more complex use of new materials. “In practice, we need digital printing capabilities so that we can create much more complex circuits that can be connected with microelectronic chips and other types of components that can be used in practice in more advanced robotics and electronics applications. is,” he says Majidi. “When you take machines and robots out of their hard cases and design them out of soft, squishy materials, there are so many possibilities.”
