The T-1000 Terminator 2 Could change shape, turn his hands into knives or turn his body into a liquid to move through metal bars. “I saw this movie when I was a child – it was like:” Wow, you can imagine: “I thought,” being able to do this? “”, Says Otger Campàs, a professor of Max Planck Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. “Now I work on embryos. And what we saw in The Terminator Actually happens in an embryo. This kind of shape shift is what an embryo does. “
Campàs and his team took inspiration from processes called fluidization and convergent extension – mechanisms that cells in embryos use to coordinate their behavior in forming tissues and organs in a developing organism. The team built a robot -like collective where every robot unit behaved like an embryonic cell. As a collective, the robots behaved like a material that could change shape and switches between fixed and liquid situations, just like the T-1000.
Real-WORLD and SCI-FI Alloys
The T-1000 was a miracle to see, but the film did not give any indications about how it worked. This is why Campàs and his colleagues were looking for instructions elsewhere. Similar form-changing properties have been observed in embryos when you see how their development was accelerated using time-lapse image formation. “Tissues in embryos can switch between fixed and liquid states to form the organs. We thought how we could develop robots that would do the same, “says Campàs.
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