Researchers have engineered groups of robots that behave as smart materials with tunable shape and strength, mimicking living systems. “We’ve figured out a way for robots to behave more like a material,” said Matthew Devlin, a former doctoral researcher in the lab of University of California, Santa Barbara (USCB) mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes, and the lead author of the article published in the journal Science.

Composed of individual, disk-shaped autonomous robots that look like small hockey pucks, the members of the collective are programmed to assemble themselves together into various forms with different material strengths.

One challenge of particular interest to the research team was creating a robotic material that could both be stiff and strong, yet be able to flow when a new form is needed. “Robotic materials should be able to take a shape and hold it” Hawkes explained, “but also able to selectively flow themselves into a new shape.” However, when robots are strongly held to each other in a group, it was not possible to reconfigure the group in a way that can flow and change shape at will. Until now.