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Now, engineers at Cornell University in New York might be well on track to recreating this exceptional self-healing capability.
The experts have developed a robot efficient in identifying when and where it has been harmed and after that restoring itself on the spot.
The little soft robotic, which resembles a four-legged starfish, uses light to find changes on its surface area that are produced by cuts.
After the researchers punctured some of its legs, the small robot was able to spot the damage and self-heal the incisions.
‘ Our lab is always trying to make robots more enduring and agile, so they operate longer with more capabilities,’ said Professor Rob Shepherd at Cornell University.
‘ If you make robots operate for a long time, they’re going to accumulate damage. And so how can we allow them to repair or deal with that damage?’
While not unbreakable, Shepherd said the brand-new starfish robot around 5 inches long has similar properties to human flesh.
‘ You don’t heal well from burning, or from things with acid or heat, because that will change the chemical properties,’.
‘ But we can do an excellent task of recovery from cuts.’
The team’s X-shaped robotic creeps along like a starfish thanks to compressed air that’s pumped through its body.
It’s covered with a layer of self-healing fibre-optic sensing units, which are coupled with LED lights efficient in detecting tiny modifications on its surface area.
In fiber-optic sensors, light from a LED is sent out through a structure called an optical waveguide, which guides the beam in a certain direction.
Also in the robot is a photodiode, which detects modifications in the light’s intensity to figure out when and where is being deformed.
For the real recovery process, they utilized polyurethane urea elastomer for its ‘skin’, a transparent and flexible material that integrates hydrogen bonds.
When cut, its exposed sides become chemically reactive, triggering the reorganization of interlocking polymer chains so it repairs it self over.
Scientists say their so-called SHeaLDS innovation ‘self-healing light guides for vibrant noticing’ enables a damage-resistant soft robot that can self-heal from cuts at space temperature level with no external intervention.
In their experiments, they punctured among the bot’s legs six times, after which the robotic was then able to find the damage, self-heal each cut in about a minute and keep moving.
With self-healing, robots could potentially repair soft-bodied systems in certian environments, such as spacesuits hit by space particles or undersea equipment.
Further advancement of the tech might also enable Terminator-style killer robots, built for the battleground, to fix the damage sustained in battle.
