Robot with self-healing skin

Better than T-1000

Have you ever imagined yourself looking at a T-1000 from Terminator 2 and thinking, will this one day exist? Well, maybe the first sparks of something in that direction are being created. Engineers at the University of Nebraska created a robotic muscle that not only moves, but also senses when it is damaged, heals itself, and restarts as if nothing had happened.

The innovation is an interesting advance in the field of so-called soft robotics, an area that tries to replicate biological systems with flexible materials, the artificial muscle created by the researchers is composed of three layers that work in harmony.

Self-healing “skin” mechanism

At the base an electronic silicone skin with micro droplets of liquid metal detects the exact location of the damage, in the middle a rigid thermoplastic layer that can melt again under heat and at the top an actuator that moves the muscle using hydraulic pressure, as if it were a real organic tissue, but the most impressive thing is the self-repair mechanism.

When the skin detects a break, it redirects electrical current towards that damaged region, temporarily transforming it into a heater. This heat melts the intermediate layer, sealing the damage autonomously, and when the repair is done, the system itself erases the record of the wound using a phenomenon that until now was considered a problem in electronics, electromigration. Engineers basically turned a glitch and a regeneration tool, despite not getting many real images of the innovation, imagine biomedical sensors that heal themselves after a fall or agricultural burglaries that self-repair after contact with thorns and branches, increasing their useful life, and by preventing premature discard this technology can also drastically reduce electronic waste, a growing problem that threatens both the environment and human health.

The importance of the discovery.

The invention was recognized globally, the project was a finalist for the best article award at the largest world robotics conference, the ICRA, the achievement is not only technical, it is symbolic, we are learning from the human body to give real autonomy to machines, not only to act but to survive, in a world where robotics is increasingly present, the ability to regenerate can be the watershed between disposable robots and durable resilient systems and who knows "almost alive."

This technology makes us rethink the limits between the biological and the artificial. Could it be that in the future we will have robots that heal like humans or perhaps better than us? The border between organism and machine is fading with each new advance.