Cornell University researchers have created microscale robots lower than 1 millimeter in size which are printed as a 2D hexagonal “metasheet” but, with a jolt of electricity, morph into preprogrammed 3D shapes and crawl.
The robot’s versatility is on account of a novel design based on kirigami, a cousin of origami, by which slices in the fabric enable it to fold, expand and locomote.
The team’s paper, “Electronically Configurable Microscopic Metasheet Robots,” published Sept. 11 in Nature Materials. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral researchers Qingkun Liu and Wei Wang. The project was led by Itai Cohen, professor of physics. His lab has previously produced microrobotic systems that may actuate their limbs, pump water via artificial cilia and walk autonomously.
In a way, the origins of the kirigami robot were inspired by “living organisms that may change their shape.” Liu said. “But when people make a robot, once it’s fabricated, it’d have the ability to maneuver some limbs but its overall shape is generally static. So we have made a metasheet robot. The ‘meta’ stands for metamaterial, meaning that they are composed of a variety of constructing blocks that work together to present the fabric its mechanical behaviors.”
The robot is a hexagonal tiling composed of roughly 100 silicon dioxide panels which are connected through greater than 200 actuating hinges, each about 10 nanometers thin. When electrochemically activated via external wires, the hinges form mountain and valley folds and act to splay open and rotate the panels, allowing the robot to vary its coverage area and locally expand and contract by as much as 40%. Depending which hinges are activated, the robot can adopt various shapes and potentially wrap itself around other objects, after which unfold itself back right into a flat sheet.
Cohen’s team is already considering of the subsequent phase of metasheet technology. They anticipate combining their flexible mechanical structures with electronic controllers to create ultra-responsive “elastronic” materials with properties that will never be possible in nature. Applications could range from reconfigurable micromachines to miniaturized biomedical devices and materials that may reply to impact at nearly the speed of sunshine, slightly than the speed of sound.
“Since the electronics on each individual constructing block can harvest energy from light, you possibly can design a cloth to reply in programmed ways to varied stimuli. When prodded, such materials, as an alternative of deforming, could ‘run’ away, or beat back with greater force than they experienced,” Cohen said. “We predict that these lively metamaterials — these elastronic materials — could form the premise for a brand new form of intelligent matter governed by physical principles that transcend what is feasible within the natural world.”
