Self-healing jelly bot regenerates when stabbed – just add heat

Along with super-human strength and the ability to look great in chrome, robots can now add another talent to their box of tricks: self-healing. Roboticists have long aimed to use soft flexible materials, but these have a propensity to break making them unfit for purpose. A new technique can create soft robots that heal themselves when things go wrong. To prove the concept, researchers at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium created a gripper, a robot hand and an artificial muscle, all with the ability to self-heal, out of rubbery polymers that look a bit like jelly. When ripped or cut they can knit back together completely.