{"id":213645,"date":"2025-05-09T13:11:03","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T18:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/material-robot-its-a-metabot"},"modified":"2025-05-09T13:11:03","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T18:11:03","slug":"material-robot-its-a-metabot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/material-robot-its-a-metabot","title":{"rendered":"Material? Robot? It\u2019s a metabot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/material-robot-its-a-metabot.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In an experiment reminiscent of the Transformers movie franchise, engineers at Princeton University have created a type of material that can expand, assume new shapes, move and follow electromagnetic commands like a remotely controlled robot even though it lacks any motor or internal gears.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou can transform between a material and a robot, and it is controllable with an external magnetic field,\u201d said researcher Glaucio Paulino, the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering at Princeton.<\/p>\n<p>In an article published April 23 in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they drew inspiration from the folding art of origami to create a structure that blurs the lines between robotics and materials. The invention is a metamaterial, which is a material engineered to feature new and unusual properties that depend on the material\u2019s physical structure rather than its chemical composition. In this case, the researchers built their metamaterial using a combination of simple plastics and custom-made magnetic composites. Using a magnetic field, the researchers changed the metamaterial\u2019s structure, causing it to expand, move and deform in different directions, all remotely without touching the metamaterial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an experiment reminiscent of the Transformers movie franchise, engineers at Princeton University have created a type of material that can expand, assume new shapes, move and follow electromagnetic commands like a remotely controlled robot even though it lacks any motor or internal gears. \u201cYou can transform between a material and a robot, and it [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213645","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=213645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}