In the Hollywood movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger became a humanoid liquid metal robot with superpower. Similarly, researchers have developed a quasi-“terminator” robot in lab. The work was published in ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces.
Most recently, the “Terminator” came out in the laboratory. A research team led by Prof. LIU Jing from Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry (TIPC) of the Chinese Academy of Science and Prof. HU Liang from Beihang University developed a magnetic liquid metals droplets (MLMD) which can be stretched in large scales both horizontally and vertically in free space at room temperature.
Previously, liquid metals behave unique properties promising for soft robot. However, the manipulation of the liquid metals at 3 Dimensional space is hardly achieved due to their high density. Many methods have been applied to control the liquid metal droplets. The droplets usually move as a whole body without intriguing shape varieties due to their high surface tension.
In this work, gallium and eutectic alloys, iron particles, and electrolytes were adopted to construct the “Terminator”. The gallium oxide layer could cover on the MLMD droplet surface by immersing it in hydrochloric acid. As a result, the droplet could be stretched up to almost four times its original length in three dimensions because of lower surface tension. The droplet could be stretched at large scale that acting as an intelligent electrical connector at free space. It can move horizontally mimicking the action of upright walking amphibians. All of the fascinating phenomenon was controlled by the permanent magnets.
This system will open up the practical applications of multi-freedom actuation in free space, perhaps the intelligent biomimetic soft robot in the future.
This work is supported by the 111 Project and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Figure. Magnetic liquid metal droplet. (Image by LIU Jing)
https://pubs.acs.org.ccindex.cn/doi/10.1021/acsami.8b22699
Email: jliu@mail.ipc.ac.cn
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