A New Soft Robot Is Able to Spot Injuries and Self-Heal

Advances in artificially intelligent robots have enabled pioneering scientists to endow them with human-like capabilities. A new study by Cornell University researchers published in Science Advances introduces an autonomous, self-healing soft robot that is not only able to identify injuries but also heal itself. The scientists plan to integrate these soft robots with artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning in the future. "We introduce an autonomous self-healing optical sensing mechanism, networks of self-healing light guides for dynamic sensing (SHeaLDS), which exploit the damage-resilient properties intrinsic to light propagation, in combination with an intrinsic self-healing material, to achieve an optomechanical sensor that both autonomously self-heals and provides reliable dynamic sensing performance," wrote Rob Shepherd, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell, in collaboration with Young Seong Kim and Hedan Bai. The soft robot consists of a flexible material called poly elastomer (polyurethane urea).