Metal robot can melt its way out of tight spaces to escape

A miniature, shape-shifting robot can liquefy itself and reform, allowing it to complete tasks in hard-to-access places and even escape cages.

In fact, this shape-shifting robot could eventually be used as a hands-free soldering machine or a tool for extracting swallowed toxic items.

Robots that are soft and malleable enough to work in narrow, delicate spaces like those in the human body already exist, but they can’t make themselves sturdier and stronger when under pressure or when they must carry something heavier than themselves.

But now, Carmel Majidi at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues have created a robot that can not only shape-shift but also become stronger or weaker by alternating between being a liquid and a solid, New Scientist reported.

They made the millimeter-sized robot from a mix of the liquid metal gallium and microscopic pieces of a magnetic material made of neodymium, iron and boron. When solid, the material was strong enough to support an object 30 times its own mass. To make it soften, stretch, move or melt into a crawling puddle as needed for different tasks, the researchers put it near magnets.