This super strength body battery is made with discarded Kevlar

Today's robot-mounted batteries provide electrical power but at the expense of added mass that in turn requires added power to move and use. But a team of researchers from the University of Michigan have devised a clever solution that will enable tomorrow's batteries to provide power while negating their own weight -- it just needs a bit of Kevlar. Led by Nicholas Kotov, a professor of chemical engineering at U of Michigan, the team has developed a battery system that is strong enough to also serve as a structural support for the rest of the robot. "Robot designs are restricted by the need for batteries that often occupy 20% or more of the available space inside a robot, or account for a similar proportion of the robot's weight," Kotov told the University of Michigan News "No other structural battery reported is comparable, in terms of energy density, to today's state-of-the-art advanced lithium batteries. We improved our prior version of structural zinc batteries on 10 different measures, some of which are 100 times better, to make it happen," he continued.