Harvard University researchers have designed a robot that can change color to camouflage itself with the environment, just as the Houdini-like octopuses that have achieved YouTube fame can do. With a rubbery, flexible body, the robot resembles a 4-legged clear Gumby. As it walks onto different colored surfaces, dye is pumped in to conceal the machine against its background. The team, which published its results this week in Science, can also pump in luminescent dyes to make the robot glow in the dark, or dyes that affect the robot’s visibility the infrared, in addition to the visible, light spectrum, allowing the researchers to make the robots camouflaged in one spectrum, but stand out in the other.
"Conventional robotics is a pretty highly developed area, and if you look at various robots you find that most are basically built on the body plan of a mammal,” coauthor George Whitesides told BBC ...
