Imagine a robot. What do you see? A sturdy steel machine built to transcend the organic vulnerability of living creatures? Unfortunately, this very quality can cause planets to own with extremely durable e-waste. Instead, what happens when our increasingly common machines are designed to collapse and disappear like life?
For research in Advances in scienceresearchers made and operated controllers like robotic arms and joysticks from pork gelatin and plant cellulose. After testing, both origami structures collapsed into the soil within a few weeks.
Biodegradable robotics are often under the umbrella of soft robotics, drawing inspiration from the more flexible works of nature. “The field came from material science and chemistry rather than traditional robots that come from mechanical engineering,” says Florian Hartman, materials scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany. However, many early soft robot prototypes still relied on synthetic polymers that remained as contamination.
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Pindong Wei, a material scientist who works with natural polymers at Westlake University in Hangzhou, collaborated with his friend Zhuang Zhang, who is now a robotics engineer at Hudan University in Shanghai, to assemble the robot for new research. Wei had long been intrigued by robotics, Chan recalls and raises the idea of ​​creating a robot himself. “That’s why when I thought, why don’t you build it with the materials he works with?”
They started with a cellulose layer derived from cotton pulp, then added glycerol for flexibility and dried the layer for strength. “Cellulose is also inexpensive and easy to assemble,” Wei says. To build the sensor, researchers used conductive gelatin extracted from pork. The pigs changed the flow of ions as they stretched, bent or pushed the ingredients. Next, I folded the flat film and sensor into a 3D structure.
Wei and Zhang discover that the controller and robotic arms confront both heavy use and a week of inactivity. Finally, they buried both of them in a deep 20cm hole near the campus. Within eight weeks, the machine was almost completely gone.
“The way researchers were able to design something very strict yet very soft is impressive,” says Ellen Lumley, a robotics engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Neither Rumley nor Hartmann were involved in this study.
Wei and Zhang imagine bots like these handling hazardous waste, then dissolve. They also propose robots that can assist in surgery and break safely inside the body. However, it is important to note that this technology is in a very early stage.
“If you really want to have a sustainable robot that goes outside in nature,” says Hartman.
