Muscle that boasts superhuman strength now becomes a reality as scientists developed a robotic muscle that can be 1,000 times more powerful than that of a human's.
The US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory has built a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from a revolutionary material called vanadium dioxide which can make it a 1,000 times more powerful than a human muscle and make it able to throw objects up to 50 times heavier than itself over a distance five times its length within 60 millisecond.
Vanadium dioxide is coveted in the electronics industry because it is one of the few materials that can be an insulator at low temperature and a conductor when the temperature is raised to 67 degrees Celsius. It also has the special ability to change size, shape and physical identity which makes it the best material for creating a powerful robotic muscle.
"We've created a micro-bimorph dual coil that functions as a powerful torsional muscle, driven thermally or electro-thermally by the phase transition of vanadium dioxide," said Junqiao Wu, a member of both the Berkeley Lab and the Berkeley University's Materials Science and Engineering department, who led the study. "Using a simple design and inorganic materials, we achieve superior performance in power density and speed over the motors and actuators now used in integrated micro-systems."
Wu also said that multiple micro-muscles can be assembled into a micro-robotic system that can simulate an active neuromuscular system.
"The naturally combined functions of proximity sensing and torsional motion allow the device to remotely detect a target and respond by reconfiguring itself to a different shape. This simulates living bodies where neurons sense and deliver stimuli to the muscles and the muscles provide motion," he said.
The technology, described in "Powerful, Multifunctional Torsional Micro Muscles Activated by Phase Transition," which was submitted to the journal Advanced Materials, is seen to open doors for scientific progress as micro-muscles could be combined to form a more complex organism.
The researchers, however, assured that a Terminator-style rise of the machines would be far out for now because the mechanism used is currently the size of a microchip.
