Physical Intelligence News
27 July 2020 | Stuttgart

Self-healing soft material outsmarts nature

Hole
A hole that can seal itself
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Physical Intelligence
Assistant Professor at University of Michigan Ann Arbour, USA
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Physical Intelligence
Guest Researcher

A soft material that heals itself instantaneously is now reality. A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and at Pennsylvania State University tune the nanostructure of a new stretchable material in such a way that it now entirely recovers its structure and properties at the blink of an eye after being cut or poked. The squid-inspired material could revolutionize the research field of soft robotics. Since it can reverse any undergone damage, it makes many real-world applications possible in which robots have to deal with dynamic and unpredictable environments.