They have a metamaterial that evolves and moves on its own

The metamaterials They are exciting. By combining physics, chemistry and engineering, as well as making small variations in the composition or structure of a material, we can completely change its properties. They can be created from light armor, but more resistant that one steel sheet of several centimeters thick to other materials that come to life and change shape at will.

And that is precisely what they have done at the University of Amsterdam.

“Learn” and “leren” in English and German

In short. The center has published an article in Nature called “Metamaterials that learn to change shape” in which they show how worm-shaped materials blur the border between objects and living systems. Each one of them is joined to the next by a motorized hinge that has a microcontroller. Thus, it measures parameters such as rotation, previous movements in a kind of memory and can send information to neighboring hinges.

Depending on the information they send, the others adjust their rigidity and position, allowing each segment to “learn” new shapes without the need for a computer to control everything. The key here is “learn.”

Training. The shapes and postures they achieve are not the result of chance, but rather the work of the researchers sending impulses so that the segments are organized in the desired configuration. Through different stages of this training, the microcontrollers update and optimize their orders until the chain “understands” that it must adopt a certain posture when a certain stimulus is sent.

They can forget old forms, retain recent ones, and, as we say, learn new ones, as well as alternate between those forms. And the interesting thing about all this is that they can develop the ability to grasp objects or move. The researchers themselves refer to this with the term “evolution,” noting that “once the system begins to learn, the possibilities of when it will stop learning feel almost limitless.

Future. That hasn’t come out of nowhere. Researchers from the Institute of Physics point out that the current research is based on previous findings in which achievement that objects would roll, crawl and move autonomously over different terrains. The difference is that they did it for the sake of it, while the new metamaterials can learn and memorize behaviors.

The future idea is to make that behavior depend on learning time instead of changes in a static way. The team points out which, for example, seek to “allow metamaterials to learn different gaits of locomotion, such as crawling or rolling, depending on environmental stimuli. We also plan to investigate so-called stochastic scenarios, where learning occurs with noise and uncertainty. In such cases, the system would adapt probabilistically rather than by determinism, improving robustness and flexibility in complex environments.”

Beyond the laboratory. After all the team’s explanation, perhaps the most complicated thing is to imagine the scenario in which this can be applied. One that they mention is soft robots, which are those that change the rigidity and shape of conventional robots for others with an adaptive structure that may have applications in the medical or aerospace industry. Also on devices programmable that are modulated in real time and “reprogrammed” depending on the situation.

But, really, the possibilities of metamaterials feel infinite, as the Institute of Physics pointed out. Playing with these structural particularities of the materials, they can be used as shielding, as isolationin building structures located in areas of high seismic activity so that redirect the energy they receivewhen creating lenses for advanced photonics, in sensors or as active camouflage around a vehicle.

Images | Institute of Physics, University of Amsterdam

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