Soft Chameleon Robot Can Stretch, Change Colors And Hide In Any Given Setting!

Soft robotics is one field that's being explored in depth, for the creation of more and more robots that can resist every type of attack. But there's a better way to go about for a robot than attacking, it can just blend in with its surrounding environment, thus deceiving the human's naked eye. Yes, the Harvard researchers have come up with new chameleon-bots which do just that- blend in the surroundings.

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Stephen Morin and his team have formulated these four-limbed rubbery robots with special skin, stranded with two types of micro-channels. Pneumatically powered, they push air via tiny channels which enables them to walk or crawl. Another set of channels is stocked with fluorescent dyes. Various mixtures of these dyes enable the robot to change its colors. Not only colors, but patterns, brightness and also temperature could be altered depending on the what function is required of the robot. They even glow in infrared (whoa!). Inspired by animals like octopus and the likes, who employ their cells or skin structures to blend in an environment, the researchers etched tiny canals in these bots, filling them up with all kinds of dyes, and once the dyes are in, no additional powered is needed from the bots' end to change color.