Shape Shifting Robots!?

Yeah you read that right, shape shifting robots might actually be a thing in the not too distant future. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have made a material from foam and a sort of wax that, much like any other wax has the ability to switch between a solid and a liquid state. It doesn't sound too fancy but in reality it is a serious piece of engineering. Anette Hosoi, the developer of this material is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and said that it could be used to build surgical robots that could move through the body and reach certain parts of the body without damaging any organs or tissues.

Working with robotics company Boston Dynamics, researchers began developing the material as part of the Chemical Robots programme of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Controlling a soft structure is difficult, It's harder to predict how the material is going to move and what shapes it is going to form, than it is with a rigid robot.

So the researchers decided that the only way to build a deformable robot would be to develop a material that can switch between a soft and hard state. This is where the foam comes in. Since foam can be squeezed down to a fraction of its normal size and then bounce back, The wax is used to coat the foam. When heated it goes liquid and when cooled it becomes solid. 

If you break this coating, you can simply heat the wax and when you cool it again the damage is repaired. The research was published in the scientific journal Macromolecular Materials and Engineering.