Turkish scientist creator of jellyfish robot

ISTANBUL

A jellyfish robot, made by a group of scientists including Turkish scientist Professor Metin Sitti, has made a tremendous impact on the world of science. 

The American Wired magazine has announced the jellyfish robot to the masses, saying that the robot can move like a jellyfish to move objects in the water and bury itself in the ground.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find more opposite opposites than jellyfish and robots. Jellyfish pump through the oceans with effortless grace, while robots struggle to not fall on their faces and that’s when they’re not catching on fire. Now, though, those two worlds are merging, with a tiny, exceedingly simple robot modeled after larval jellyfish that can scoot around untethered like the real thing. At less than a quarter inch across, the magnetically activated robot mimics the entrancing locomotion of a jellyfish and can use the resulting disruption of water flow to manipulate objects or burrow into the ground,” the magazine said.

One of the names behind the jellyfish robot is Sitti, director of the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. 

Last year, due to his groundbreaking biomedical work with micro- and nanotechnologies, Sitti became the third winner of the Koç University Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science. 

The jellyfish robot has eight arms, consisting of a soft base with magnetic microparticles embedded and tips made of non-magnetic “passive” polymers. 

Researchers place the robot in a tank surrounded by electromagnetic coils. By manipulating the magnetic field, they can control the magnetic bits of the robot’s arms. 

“If you apply a slow magnetic field in an upward direction, the arms will bend up slowly,” says Sitti.
“And then we do a very fast, sharp downward magnetic signal that bends the arms very fast downwards.”
The tips of the arms then also bend, mimicking the gelatinous movements of an eight-armed larval jellyfish.