Can A Robot Work Without Electricity?

A fluid-based circuit allows robots to operate without electricity, enabling robots to function in environments where traditional power sources are unavailable or unreliable.

Researchers at King’s College London have devised a novel compact circuit that transmits commands to devices through pressure variations in a fluid. This breakthrough paves the way for a new generation of robots, where their physical operations can function independently of an internal control center, allowing more room for sophisticated AI-driven software in the robot’s system.

The findings could lead to the development of robots capable of operating in environments where electricity-powered devices fail, such as in irradiated areas like Chernobyl, where circuits are easily damaged, or in electricity-sensitive settings like MRI rooms.

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Researchers also envision that these robots could one day be deployed in low-income regions with limited or unreliable access to electricity, offering a practical solution for areas with infrastructure challenges.

Robots depend on electricity and computer chips, with a “brain” of algorithms sending instructions to hardware via an encoder. In soft robotics, where flexible materials like robotic muscles are used, rigid encoders add complexity and strain software, especially for precise tasks like gripping a door handle.

To address this, the research team developed a reconfigurable circuit with an adjustable valve that can be integrated directly into the robot’s hardware. This valve functions like a transistor in a typical circuit, allowing engineers to send signals to the hardware using pressure, mimicking binary code. This enables the robot to perform complex actions without needing electricity or instructions from a central control unit, providing a higher level of control than existing fluid-based circuits.

By shifting the control burden from software to hardware, the new circuit frees up computational capacity, allowing future robotic systems to be more adaptive, complex, and functional.

The researchers now aim to scale up their circuits from small experimental devices to larger robots, including crawlers for power plant monitoring and wheeled robots with entirely soft engines.