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Liquid Robots Will Keep Working So Long As You Give Them Food
By Mikelle Leow, 09 Dec 2021
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Video screenshot via Berkeley Lab
Pay these tiny robots in “food,” and they’ll keep working for as long as you want.
As sophisticated and automated as the robotics world has come to be, most machinery still requires electricity or a battery. The answer really could be as straightforward as providing simple nourishment. For these liquid robots—deemed to be the first self-powered ones of their kind (called liquibots)—it’s salt.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst learned that by “feeding” a crew of “water-walking” robots with the mineral, they were able to dive underwater to extract precious chemicals, then deliver the goods above the surface—continuously and without electricity, opening up possibilities for automated pharmaceutical deliveries in the body, for example. The team documented their observations in a new paper published in the Nature Chemistry journal.
Senior author Tom Russell of the University of Massachusetts Amherst said that the technology has “broken a barrier” for the liquibot family. Previously, scientists were able to get liquibots to perform autonomously, but they would either only complete the job once or need electricity. “We don’t have to provide electrical energy because our liquibots get their power or ‘food’ chemically from the surrounding media,” Russell said in a press release.
“Feeding” the little robots, measuring just two millimeters in diameter, bloats them up and makes them heavier or denser than the surrounding liquid solution. The density causes them to cluster in the middle, where they can collect chemical cargo, which in turn creates oxygen bubbles that carry the liquibots to the top.
At the surface, the robots will drop the cargo, before going back down to repeat the process.
Russell and the paper’s lead author Ganhua Xie will next study how this technique can be scaled up to carry out larger tasks, as well as see how it can be applied on solid surfaces.
[via ScienceDaily, video and cover image via Berkeley Lab]
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