A team of researchers has developed a versatile robot utilizing a novel design inspired by kirigami—a technique related to origami that involves making slices in materials to enable folding, expanding, and locomotion. This breakthrough allows the robot to change shape, expand its coverage area, and even contract by up to 40%.
The team’s paper, titled “Electronically Configurable Microscopic Metasheet Robots,” was published on September 11 in Nature Materials. Co-lead authors of the paper are postdoctoral researchers Qingkun Liu and Wei Wang, while the project was led by Itai Cohen, a professor of physics. Cohen’s lab has previously produced microrobotic systems capable of actuating limbs, autonomously walking, and pumping water using artificial cilia.
Origins of the Kirigami Robot
According to Liu, the inspiration for the kirigami robot comes from living organisms that can alter their shape. Liu explained that traditional robots often have a static overall shape once fabricated, even though they might be able to move some limbs. To overcome this limitation, the team developed a metasheet robot. “The ‘meta’ refers to metamaterial,” Liu clarified. “These robots are made from numerous building blocks that collaborate to produce specific mechanical behaviors.
The robot features a hexagonal tiling made up of approximately 100 silicon dioxide panels, interconnected by over 200 actuating hinges, each as thin as 10 nanometers. When electrochemically activated by external wires, the hinges create mountain and valley folds, causing the panels to splay open and rotate, allowing the robot to change its shape.
Future of Metasheet Technology
Cohen’s team is already planning the next phase of metasheet technology, aiming to combine these flexible mechanical structures with electronic controllers to create ultra-responsive materials. These “elastronic” materials could have properties far beyond those found in nature. Potential applications include reconfigurable micromachines, miniaturized biomedical devices, and materials that can respond to impact at the speed of light.
Cohen explained the potential: “Because the electronics on each individual building block can harvest energy from light, you can design a material to respond in programmed ways to various stimuli. When prodded, these materials, instead of deforming, could ‘run’ away or push back with more force than they experienced.”
This development hints at the future possibility of active metamaterials or elastronic materials—a new type of intelligent matter governed by advanced physical principles, far surpassing what is possible in the natural world.
