The researchers have developed small robots that can work together as a collective that changes shape and even moves between solid states and “similar to a fluid” – a concept that should be familiar to any person still haunted by the nightmares of the T-1000 Robotics Assassin from “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 collectives of robotic units which can organize in practically any form with all physical properties … has long intrigued science and fiction”.
Otger Campàs, professor at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics, said to Ars Technica that the team was inspired by fabrics in embryos to try to design robots with similar capacities. These robots have motorized gears that allow them to move in collective magnets so that they can remain attached and photodetectors which allow them to receive instructions from a flashlight with a polarization filter.
Campàs said that reality remains “far from the Terminator thing”, with remaining size and power challenges. The researchers’ robots were just over 5 centimeters in diameter, although the objective is to drop them to 1 or 2 centimeters, or even smaller.
