Nature Inspires Robots With Materials That Think

Prosthetics with a realistic sense of touch, bridges that detect and repair their own damage, and vehicles with camouflaging capabilities - these are just some of the robotic technologies that researchers are hoping to achieve in the future. And one team at the University of Colorado Boulder is turning to nature for inspiration for such "thinking" robots.

"We looked at organisms like the cuttlefish, which change their appearance depending on their environment, and the banyan tree, which grows above-ground roots to support the increasing weight of the trunk," lead author Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor of computer science, said in a press release. "We asked what it would take to engineer such systems."

Robotic materials require tight integration between sensing, computation and actually changing the materials properties of the underlying material. While materials can already be programmed to change some of their properties in response to specific stimuli, robotic materials can sense stimuli and determine how to respond on their own.

"The human sensory system automatically filters out things like the feeling of clothing rubbing on the skin," Correll explained. "An artificial skin with possibly thousands of sensors could do the same thing, and only report to a central 'brain' if it touches something new."

While all of these materials are certainly possible, the authors note that manufacturing materials that can think is a different story.

"Right now, we're able to make these things in the lab on a much larger scale, but we can't scale them down," Correll said. "The same is true for nano- and microscale manufacturing, which can't be scaled up to things like a building façade."

Though science may be a ways away from making such technologies, advances in materials science, distributed algorithms and manufacturing processes are bringing all of these things closer to reality every day. Correll does believe that at some point in the future robotic materials will be a part of our day-to-day lives.

The findings were published in the journal Science.

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