The Rise Of The Robots?

New material could lead to swarms of machines that act as a single-minded unit.

16:54 28 July 2016

An international team of researchers has created a new material that can self-assemble into a swarm, acting as a single-minded unit. The researchers replicate the swarming behaviour of bees and ants and created a set of self-propelled small spheres known as ‘Janus colloids.’ 

 

Janus colloids have two sides – one with a positive charge and the other with a negative charge. The charges change when the colloids are exposed to an electric field, causing electrostatic interactions between different colloids. The spheres automatically form into patterns by attracting one another, creating a chain, a sphere or a cluster. 

 

Researchers, who were led by Dr Erik Luijten of Northwestern University, wrote in their paper: 'We [used] swimming Janus colloids, which are particles with two distinct hemispheres that present a prototypical synthetic material with the capacity to self-propel thanks to broken symmetry. 

 

The team envisions the material to be used to improve the delivery of drugs through the body. They said that drugs could be placed inside the spheres, which will then be able to assemble themselves in the body where they are needed. However, this opens the possibility of the material building self-forming robots that exist as individual machine, acting a single unit or an army.