{"id":207039,"date":"2025-02-23T13:08:50","date_gmt":"2025-02-23T19:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/turning-robotic-ensembles-into-smart-materials-that-mimic-life"},"modified":"2025-02-23T13:08:50","modified_gmt":"2025-02-23T19:08:50","slug":"turning-robotic-ensembles-into-smart-materials-that-mimic-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/turning-robotic-ensembles-into-smart-materials-that-mimic-life","title":{"rendered":"Turning robotic ensembles into smart materials that mimic life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bCBVJg4I3Zg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Researchers have engineered groups of robots that behave as smart materials with tunable shape and strength, mimicking living systems. \u201cWe\u2019ve figured out a way for robots to behave more like a material,\u201d 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.ads7942\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> published in the journal Science.<\/p>\n<p>Composed of individual, disk-shaped <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/autonomous+robots\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">autonomous robots<\/a> that look like small hockey pucks, the members of the collective are programmed to assemble themselves together into various forms with different material strengths.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u201cRobotic materials should be able to take a shape and hold it\u201d Hawkes explained, \u201cbut also able to selectively flow themselves into a new shape.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers have engineered groups of robots that behave as smart materials with tunable shape and strength, mimicking living systems. \u201cWe\u2019ve figured out a way for robots to behave more like a material,\u201d said Matthew Devlin, a former doctoral researcher in the lab of University of California, Santa Barbara (USCB) mechanical engineering professor Elliot Hawkes, and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207039\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}