The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Tsinghua University are getting close to making a breakthrough in developing a flexible metal transformed from a solid metal, which is similar to the T-1000 in the movie "The Terminator."
This metal is a combination of liquid and solid and enables the liquid metal machinery to have functional structures, like bones for a live person.
Last year, the team of scientists discovered that a single drop of gallium, a type of metal that is under 30 degrees Celsius, can change its shape. When electrical current is applied to it, the metal transforms.
Without the current, it returns to its drop-like form.
The leader of the team, Liu Jing, said, "The machine has two processes. One is to create gasses like hydrogen. Part of these gasses from the propulsion."
He added, "There's also something important, in fact very important, which is the electricity generated behind the alloy. So this galvanic battery creates an internal electrical power, and this type of electricity will very easily lead to stretching of the surface of the liquid metal in an asymmetrical pattern, and this pattern leads to rotations inside the liquid metal, and the process of these rotations will set the liquid metal in motion in a certain direction."
Now the joint team has come up with a device that the liquid metal machinery triggered violin-like wire oscillation and jumping liquid metal droplet inside sets of solid-liquid combined machinery.
Liu hopes that the discoveries in shape-shifting metals will pave the way for more flexible robots.
He said, "Perhaps people think it's like the Terminator but I think to a certain extent the Terminator's not very good, he wasn't good for mankind. So we hope that if in the future we can really make a soft robot, we hope that it can be a more human-like robot."