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Nature Inspires Robots With Materials That Think
Nature Inspires Robots With Materials That Think
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By Jenna Iacurci Mar 20, 2015 05:39 PM EDT
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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
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for such "thinking" robots.
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Up a Forest
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"We looked at organisms like the cuttlefish, which change their
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appearance depending on their environment, and the banyan tree, 2
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which grows aboveground roots to support the increasing weight
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of the trunk," lead author Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor of Millions of Stars Forming in
computer science, said in a press release. "We asked what it would Mysterious Cloud
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take to engineer such systems."
While all of these materials are certainly possible, the authors note 6 He Likes Big Butts? Man Might
Actually be Eyeing the Spine
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 7 Scientists Solve Darwin's 'Strange
like a building façade." Animal' Mystery
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 daytoday
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21/03/2015 Nature Inspires Robots With Materials That Think : Tech : Nature World News
lives.
The findings were published in the journal Science.
For more great nature science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global
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