A team of UCLA engineers and their colleagues have developed a new design strategy and 3D printing technique to build robots in one single step.
A study that outlined the advance, along with the construction and demonstration of an assortment of tiny robots that walk, maneuver and jump, was published in Science today.
The breakthrough enabled the entire mechanical and electronic systems needed to operate a robot to be manufactured all at once by a new type of 3D printing process for engineered active materials with multiple functions (also known as metamaterials). Once 3D printed, a “meta-bot” will be capable of propulsion, movement, sensing and decision-making.
The printed metamaterials consist of an internal network of sensory, moving…
