News, Scientists Use ‘Swarmalation’ to Design Active Materials for Self-regulating Soft Robots

In nature, organisms that swarm such as birds and fish are able to coordinate their locations relative to the other birds or fish in their swarm, allowing them to act as one large unit. Other organisms like fireflies are able to coordinate their temporal behavior, allowing them to eventually flash their lights on and off at the same time as each other. It is not common for an organism to be able to coordinate both its spatial movements and temporal behavior. An example, however, is the Japanese tree frog. Taking inspiration from organisms that can coordinate both their spatial movements and temporal behavior, such as the Japanese tree frog, chemical engineers at the University of Pittsburgh designed “a system of self-oscillating flexible materials that display a distinctive mode of dynamic self-organization”. They designed “micron and millimeter sized flexible sheets in solution that respond to a non-periodic input of chemical reactants by spontaneously undergoing oscillatory changes in location, motion and shape.” The reactions on the surfaces of the sheet cause them to deform and “move” in the solution. With a single sheet’s movements, the solution is disrupted and causes other sheets in the solution to move as well. They can then move together in-phase or out-of-phase with each other.

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