- Title: RAW VIDEO: Scientists Create Dancing 'Transformers' Metabots
- Date: 29th April 2025
- Description:Credit: Princeton University/Cover Images Engineers at Princeton University have created bizarre new ‘metabots’ that can transform shape, move, and dance independent of any motor or gears. The ‘metabots’, which Princeton researchers have likened to rudimentary versions of the Autobots and the Decepticons from the Transformers franchise, are made from a new type of material that can expand, assume new shapes, move and follow electromagnetic commands like a remotely controlled robot even though it lacks any motor or internal gears. “You can transform between a material and a robot, and it is controllable with an external magnetic field,” said researcher Glaucio Paulino, the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering at Princeton. In an article published April 23 in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they drew inspiration from the folding art of origami to create a structure that blurs the lines between robotics and materials. The invention is a metamaterial, which is a material engineered to feature new and unusual properties that depend on the material’s physical structure rather than its chemical composition. In this case, the researchers built their metamaterial using a combination of simple plastics and custom-made magnetic composites. Using a magnetic field, the researchers changed the metamaterial’s structure, causing it to expand, move and deform in different directions, all remotely without touching the metamaterial. The team called their creation a “metabot” — a metamaterial that can shift its shape and move. “The electromagnetic fields carry power and signal at the same time. Each behaviour is very simple but when you put them together the behavior can be very complex,” said Minjie Chen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton. “This research has pushed the boundaries of power electronics by demonstrating that torque can be passed remotely, instantaneously, and precisely over a distance to trigger intricate robotic motions.” The metabot is a modular conglomeration of many reconfigurable unit cells that are mirror images of each other. This mirroring, called chirality, allows for complex behaviour. Tuo Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Paulino’s lab said the metabot can make large contortions — twisting, contracting and shrinking — in response to a simple push. Xuanhe Zhao, an expert in materials and robotics who was not involved in the research, said the “work opens a new and exciting avenue in origami design and applications.” “The current work has achieved extremely versatile mechanical metamaterials by controlling the assembly and chiral state of the modules,” said Zhao, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor at MIT. “The versatility and potential functionality of the modular, chiral origami metamaterials are truly impressive.” Davide Bigoni, a professor of solid and structural mechanics at the Universita’ di Trento in Italy, called the work groundbreaking and said it could “drive a paradigm shift across multiple fields including soft robotics, aerospace engineering, energy absorption, and spontaneous thermoregulation.” Exploring the technology’s robotics applications, Tuo Zhao, an author of the paper, used a laser lithography machine at the Princeton Materials Institute to create a prototype metabot that was 100 microns in height (a little thicker than a human hair). The researchers said similar robots could one day deliver medicines to specific parts of the body or help surgeons repair damaged bones or tissue. The researchers built plastic tubes with supporting struts arranged so the tubes twist when compressed, and compress when twisted. In origami, these tubes are called Kresling patterns. The researchers created the building blocks of their design by connecting two mirror-image Kresling tubes at the base to make one long cylinder. As a result, one end of the cylinder folds when twisted in one direction and the other end folds when twisted in the opposite direction. This simple pattern of repeating tubes makes it possible to move each section of the tube independently using precisely engineering magnetic fields. The magnetic field causes the Kresling tubes to twist, collapse, or pop open, creating complex behaviours. A more distant use for the new material would be to design physical structures that mimic the performance of logic gates made with transistors in a computer - potentially creating complex structures that can move in intricate ways, like a Transformer! The work was a joint effort at Princeton. Postdoctoral researcher Xiangxin Dang, of Paulino’s civil engineering lab, prepared simulations and models for analyzing the metamaterial deformation, Konstantinos Manos, a graduate student co-advised by both Chen’s electrical engineering lab and Paulino’s lab, worked to build the magnetic drive hardware, and postdoctoral researcher Shixi Zang from Paulino’s lab performed experiments and worked with professor Jyotirmoy Mandal’s Optical and Thermal Design Lab to design and build the thermoregulator.
- Collection: Cover Media
- Genre:Entertainment
- Producer:Cover Media
- Transmission Date:29/04/2025
- Decade: 2020s