CANADA: The robot T-1000 from ‘Terminator 2’ is well known to us all. Fans of the 1991 movie had shivers, while science aficionados questioned whether such a thing would ever be possible due to the character.
But in the last thirty years, science has made it conceivable. The development of a robot that can alternate between the solid and liquid states was disclosed earlier this month, enabling it to move through a variety of barriers and situations without sacrificing strength.
To illustrate the robot’s capabilities, researchers used the technology in several circumstances.
The robot is valuable in fields like electrical assembly and the medical industry, according to a team of Chinese experts who overcame the limits while conducting the research.
The work describing this innovation was published in the journal ‘Matter’. It explains how liquid metal was infused with small magnetic particles and how those particles heated and cooled the metal by varying the magnetic functions.
The researchers also published a video of the robot altering its condition along with the paper. The image shows the little robot being imprisoned.
It emerges from the cell and raises its temperature a few seconds later, melting to the ground like the T-1000 from Terminator 2. It then promptly regains its shape by cooling down after emerging.
They said they got the idea from sea cucumbers, which can change how stiff their tissues are to increase their load capacity and decrease physical damage.
The researchers employed gallium, a soft metal with a melting point of 29.76 degrees Celsius, to build the robot.
Researchers say they made a “magnetoactive solid-liquid phase transitional machine” by putting gallium and magnetic particles in a sleeve.
“Here, the magnetic particles serve two purposes. One is that they make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field, allowing you to heat it and induce a phase transition through induction. However, the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the capacity to respond to the magnetic field,” Carmel Majidi, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the study’s authors, remarked.
The robot will now be used in real-world applications, but scientists claim that it needs to be improved first.
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