Engineers have developed a soft robot that changes colours in real-time based on its background.
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Created by engineers at the Seoul National University in South Korea (study published in Nature), the robot essentially has a segmented back that resembles an artificial chameleon skin that’s covering the skeleton of the walking robot.?
The engineers were able to achieve this with the help of a novel technique that fuses integrated thermochromic liquid crystal layers with vertically stacked, patterned silver nanowire heating networks.?
There are colour sensors and feedback systems mounted at the bottom of the robot with sensors that detect background colour to transition the colour of the skin.?
The skin is embedded with temperature-driven colour changing liquid crystal layers that are vertically stacked patterned silver nanowire heating networks.?
These warm up the liquid crystals in a way that it gradually changes to match with the background, based on what the sensor sees.?
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According to the paper author and mechanical engineer Seung Hwan Ko of the Seoul National University in South Korea, the ultimate form of the robot would be turning into a sort of invisibility cloak, allowing anyone to easily blend in the background.?
He also emphasised that it could be a great covert intelligent scout robot that would hide in plain sight. Moreover, it could also make new kinds of camouflage for soldiers on the battlefield.
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As of now, the robot is slightly larger in size than a real chameleon but they’re hoping to scale down the digital reptile in future iterations. They also plan on adding the ability to reflect textures of background surfaces at a higher resolution, which they feel could be possible using advanced signal processing and data-driven science.?
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