Towards self-healing robot skin

Posted 14 Jun 2007 at 08:03 UTC by mwaibel

A research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a new bio-inspired material with an embedded microvascular network that mimics human skin. The network supplies healing agent to damaged surface regions, which allows their material to autonomically heal crack damage to the same location up to 7 times. Their findings were published in Nature Materials (full text, PDF). For a gallery of pictures and videos have a look at the project page.