TECH NEWS – Korean engineers have built a soft-bodied robot that can change colour like a chameleon to blend in with its surroundings.

Seung Hwan Ko, a professor at Seoul National University, told the BBC that the technology’s ultimate use is likely for camouflage. Still, he said it could also be used for “cosmetic” purposes, such as making clothes or buildings match their surroundings. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

To create the robot’s colour-changing skin, the scientists used “thermochromic liquid crystal ink”, which changes colour depending on temperature, with the help of “silver nanowire heating elements”. The researchers claim that the resulting colour changes were fast enough to be “comparable to physiological colour changes seen in animals”, the researchers claim.

Under the robot’s “skin” is colour sensors which, although they can respond to the colours of the surface they pass over, cannot yet mimic the patterns of complex backgrounds. Instead, it has a set of pre-programmed patterns that help it blend in with its surroundings.

However, as the colour changes are caused by the heating and cooling of the synthetic ‘skin’, some experts believe that ambient temperatures could hurt the robot’s chameleon-like abilities, not to mention that it would only hide the robot from prying eyes in the optical range, with a thermal camera immediately exposing the poor thing.

Source: nature.com