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Liquid Metal Soft Machines pp 1–12Cite as

Introduction

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Part of the book series: Topics in Mining, Metallurgy and Materials Engineering ((TMMME))

Abstract

Making soft robots that can flexibly transform among different morphologies has long been a dream in both science and engineering areas. With outstanding versatile capabilities, liquid metals are opening breakthrough strategies for molding future smart soft robots that had never been anticipated before or hardly achievable by a rigid metal or conventional material. All the evidences collected so far pointed out that liquid metal machine is evolving via a rather quick way. The latest discoveries on a group of very fundamental phenomena of liquid metals and technological advances thus enabled significantly strengthened this endeavor. Clearly, combining allied components with the liquid metal systems is offering many brand new machine roles as well as incubating future highly advanced robots. In fact, capabilities as offered by liquid metals are far much profound than one can expect. There is plenty of space to explore in the area. This chapter gives a brief overview of soft robots and some unconventional opportunities that liquid metal could provide for innovating the soft machine science and technology.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Jing Liu

  2. Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Lei Sheng

  3. College of Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Zhi-Zhu He

Authors
  1. Jing Liu
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  2. Lei Sheng
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  3. Zhi-Zhu He
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jing Liu .

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Liu, J., Sheng, L., He, ZZ. (2019). Introduction. In: Liquid Metal Soft Machines. Topics in Mining, Metallurgy and Materials Engineering. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2709-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2709-4_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-2708-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-2709-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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