Picture credit score: Jeon et al., Sci. Adv. 11, eadt5888 (2025)
A lab in Seoul had a significant breakthrough with a mission that produced a robotic that resembles a gummy bear and behaves like a residing cell. Simply strive dropping it from a desk to see what occurs – it splats after which simply rolls away prefer it by no means occurred. Squeeze it between your fingers and it oozes like jelly, solely to snap again to its authentic form if you let go. Play a burst of sound at it by sending two of them in direction of one another and so they principally kiss, fuse and rework into one greater blob – full with no matter every one swallowed alongside the way in which.
They’ve been dubbed the primary robots constructed nearly utterly of water. Each one begins as a wonderfully fashioned ice dice little longer than a fingernail in size. The engineers then sprinkle the dice with Teflon flakes which are the scale of salt grains. Because the ice melts, the Teflon flakes type a water-resistant pores and skin that stops any drops from escaping. The completed robotic weighs lower than a paper clip and prices round one penny.
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Set one on a puddle of water and it floats similar to a beetle. Attempt nudging it gently with a 24 kilohertz hum from an off the shelf ultrasound wand and it zips throughout the floor quicker than you possibly can wipe your finger throughout the floor. Tilt the wand and the robotic begins to stroll up the pool wall, leaps onto dry land and simply retains proper on rolling – no moist footprints left behind.
When positioned in a pool of water, it floats very similar to a beetle does. Attempt frivolously prodding it with a 24 kilohertz hum from an off-the-shelf ultrasound wand, and it’ll glide throughout the floor quicker than you possibly can wipe your finger throughout it. Tilt the wand, and the robotic begins to walk up the pool wall, leaps onto dry land, and continues to roll with out leaving any moist footprints.
Take into account a barrier with gaps half the robotic’s width; any standard strong stone would simply bounce straight off. A single water droplet would primarily smear and stick. The Teflon robotic, however, merely splits alongside the center, threads each items via a separate hole, after which fuses again collectively on the opposite aspect, very similar to the T-1000 from Terminator 2. Solely this one performs every little thing at room temperature, with out the requirement for liquid metallic.
Give one a roll over a glass bead, and the pores and skin will solely open lengthy sufficient for the bead to slide inside earlier than sealing again up. Repeat the method with a grain of rust-colored iron salt, and the robotic will flip a powerful sundown orange. Give it one other robotic that has a transparent crystal antidote, then fuse the 2 collectively, and the ensuing blob will flash a powerful blood purple because the chemical compounds combine inside a non-public mini-reactor in regards to the measurement of a raindrop.
The engineers created a small cliff that’s 13 millimeters tall, ten instances the peak of the robotic. They then pushed two laden robots down the sting, watched as they hit on the ground, flattened out like pancakes, after which, with out spilling a single molecule, stood again up and mixed into one massive blob. That is very completely different from how liquid robots used to behave after they hit the bottom and burst aside. These ones merely shrug and hold going.
They didn’t require any wires, batteries, or magnets to operate. You solely want a handheld ultrasound probe held two inches above the desk to get them transferring. Transfer the probe, and the robotic will observe. Decrease it, and the robotic merely stops. Nonetheless, in case you put the probe straight down at two robots, they may flatten and weld into one. The louder the ultrasonic probe buzzes, the quicker they transfer – as much as six physique lengths per second.
Beneath a microscope, the pores and skin resembles dragon scales customary from breakfast cereal. Every flake covers the following, packed so tightly that water strain alone can’t separate them. When the robotic expands, the scales transfer previous one another quite than shattering. When it shrinks, they pack extra tightly. The armor is self-healing for the reason that flakes are at all times floating on the water’s floor.
Outdated liquid robots began as excellent spheres—the form with the least pores and skin for the amount. That left too few flakes to go round. The Korean group flipped the recipe: begin with a dice, which has fifty-five p.c extra floor space. Freeze it, coat it, soften it. The shrinking ice crams the flakes collectively till they type armor plate as a substitute of a free sweater.
The researchers printed a dinner-plate area with hills, jails, and a swimming pool. One robotic jail-broke a yellow “toxin” pellet. One other swam the pool for the purple antidote. Each jumped the cliff, merged mid-air, turned purple, then rolled to a drain. A single drop of cleaning soap on the drain cracked the armor and poured the neutralized waste right into a vial beneath. Whole time: forty-five seconds. Human fingers by no means touched the chemical compounds.
Ship a thousand right into a nuclear cooling pond to clean radioactive mud. Drop a fleet down a clogged pipe to eat rust and flush themselves out. NASA is already asking whether or not a freezer on Mars might stamp out ice-cube robots to discover ice caves the place wheels concern to tread.
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