We’ve all seen the Boston Dynamics robots that look like they’ll probably effectively hunt you down and maim you of their own accord if they fancied it and wondered just exactly what the company are doing by creating them, but now the America’s Carnegie Mellon University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have decided to team up and tell Bostons Dynamics to hold their beer.

Featured Image VIA

Everyone remembers the scene in ‘Terminator 2’ where Robert Patrick’s T-1000 turns into liquid to escape his prison cell, so obviously these incredibly smart researchers at these universities decided to replicate this process in real life with an autonomous robot. You can see that happening very clearly in the clip below whilst senior author Professor Carmel Majidi explains the science and purpose of the robot:

One option is that they make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field, so you can, through induction, heat up the material and cause the phase change.

But the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the ability to move in response to the magnetic field.

Future work should further explore how these robots could be used within a biomedical context.

What we’re showing are just one-off demonstrations, proofs of concept, but much more study will be required to delve into how this could actually be used for drug delivery or for removing foreign objects.

Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid states endows them with more functionality.

Now, we’re pushing this material system in more practical ways to solve some very specific medical and engineering problems.

Yeah I guess it’s cool that they’re creating this technology for the benefit of the medical community, but isn’t it almost an absolute certainty that someone is going to co-opt this knowledge and use it for the forces of evil? I think these companies/universities need to stop doing these things before it’s too late. Please.

For more of the same, check out what the Spanish Terminator said instead of ‘Hasta La Vista, Baby‘. Completely ridiculous.