A new type ot sort robot can go under the knife and make a full recovery in about a day. Researchers fashioned a robotic hand, a gripper (shown above) and muscle from self-healing rubbery material. To test the robots' resilience, the engineers sliced each with a scalpel, then put the robots in an oven. After cranking up the heat to 80° Celsius, baking the bots for 40 minutes, then cooling them to about room temperature, the researchers found that all the cuts had closed up. A day later, the machines had regained almost all of their original strength and flexibility, the researchers report online August 16 in Science Robotics.
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