Pasta-shaped robot with no moving parts can navigate through mazes

A soft robot with no motors, batteries or computers can roll over a range of surfaces and escape simple mazes by harvesting heat energy and turning it into motion. Jie Yin at North Carolina State University and his colleagues created a spiral-shaped device from a narrow rectangle of rubber-like material impregnated with liquid crystals. When placed on a surface heated to at least 55 C, the areas of the robot touching the surface warm up and expand, while others remain static. This causes a twisting motion that rolls the device along at speeds up to 3.8 millimetres per second. Although the robot has no computational ability, it can achieve relatively complex tasks such as navigating mazes.