This jelly robot can bend, twist, and swing
Scientists in the UK have built a super-stretchy jelly-like robot made from electro-morphing gel (e-MG).
Made from a special gel, it can stretch nearly three times its size and move in all sorts of ways—twisting, bending, even swinging—just by using electric fields.
And it does all this without any motors or magnets.
The possibilities are pretty cool
The team demonstrated a gymnast-shaped prototype that could swing along a ceiling, separate demonstrations of snail-like jumps, and object-transport and gripper tests; the material also showed consistent actuation over 10,000 cycles.
The possibilities are pretty cool: think medical wearables that flex with your body, tiny rescue bots for hard-to-reach places, or robots exploring space.
A breakthrough in soft robotics
Unlike older microrobots that need bulky setups or magnets to work, electro-morphing gel (e-MG) robots are lightweight and customizable for different jobs.
As lead author Ciquun Xu said, the work marks an exciting breakthrough that paves the way for further progress in soft robotics, opening up new ways to use flexible robots in real life.