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In a pair of small laboratories in Prague, a swarm of tens of millions of robots is being prepared, to be set loose en masse.
It is only fitting that here, in the town where the word robot was coined by author Karel Capek, the next generation of robotics should be envisioned.
But these won't be typical robots with gears and motors; they will instead be made of carefully designed chemical shells-within-shells, with receptors on their surface.
Instead of software and processors to guide them, their instructions will be written into the chemistry of their constituent parts. They are chemical robots, or as the 1.6m euro project's title has it, chobots.
In fact, notes Frantisek Stepanek of Prague's Institute of Chemical Technology, they are more like the robots described by Capek himself, formed of "...a blob of some kind of colloidal jelly that not even a dog would eat".
Dr Stepanek's robots will be small - tens of micrometres or less, a hair's breadth across - so that they can get into the tiniest places, or be dispersed in their millions for bigger tasks.
Those tasks will be to release a chemical payload, or mix two chemical reactants or "precursors" from different compartments within the chobots when they reach their goal.
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Full Article at the BBC
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A revolutionary new technology may allow future warfighters to command their equipment to physically change itself to meet new operational needs or to form spare parts or tools. Researchers are developing techniques to order materials to self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves. These capabilities offer the possibility for morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and “soft” robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.
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