Researchers from Estonia's University of Tartu and the Italian Institute of Technology have built a moth-shaped robot that can grow a new sensor using chemicals carried in its artificial blood, New Atlas reports. The study is published in Advanced Science.
The robot's 3D-printed plastic body has tiny veins through which a pump moves about 3 ml of liquid containing pyrrole. When the team shone ultraviolet light through a stencil onto part of a wing, the pyrrole turned into an electrically conductive plastic, polypyrrole, creating a sensor that gold wires printed into the body could read.
When UV light hits the patch, its resistance drops for a moment, which the onboard chip answers with a blinking LED or a flap of the wings. Four months in storage did not stop the sensor working, but the prototype cannot fly and its wings are moved by a nitinol wire powered from outside.
Kadri-Ann Pankratov, the study's first author and a University of Tartu PhD student, said growing the receptor on site lets the environment shape the robot.
