If life as a kid in the 1980s and ’90s taught me anything, it’s that the rise of our machine overlords is a certainty. A new study shows remarkable progress being made in this area, with the development of a hyper-flexible multi-state material that is pretty clearly one more step towards realizing T2-series Terminator robots that can melt through any opening.
The material, technically known as “Magnetoactive Liquid-Solid Phase Transitional Matter” (MPTM, but we can also call it “robot juice” for brevity), was developed by research teams working out of labs at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and took its inspiration from an unexpected source: the humble sea cucumber.
“The original idea is inspired by sea cucumbers that can shift their bodies’ stiffness for environmental adaptation,” researcher Chengfeng Pan told Hyperallergic. “Thus, we were thinking how about we make robots that can also switch their stiffness or even push to the shifting between solid and liquid.”
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