By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Robotics & Machine Learning Daily News Daily News-If it walks like a particle, and talks like a particle... it may still not be a particle. A topological soliton is a s pecial type of wave or dislocation which behaves like a particle: it can move ar ound but cannot spread out and disappear like you would expect from, say, a ripp le on the surface of a pond. In a new study published in Nature, researchers fro m the University of Amsterdam demonstrate the atypical behaviour of topological solitons in a robotic metamaterial, something which in the future may be used to control how robots move, sense their surroundings and communicate. Topological solitons can be found in many places and at many different length sc ales. For example, they take the form of kinks in coiled telephone cords and lar ge molecules such as proteins. At a very different scale, a black hole can be un derstood as a topological soliton in the fabric of spacetime. Solitons play an i mportant role in biological systems, being relevant for protein folding and morp hogenesis - the development of cells or organs. The unique features of topological solitons - that they can move around but alwa ys retain their shape and cannot suddenly disappear - are particularly interesti ng when combined with so-called non-reciprocal interactions. "In such an interac tion, an agent A reacts to an agent B differently to the way agent B reacts to a gent A," explains Jonas Veenstra, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam a nd first author of the new publication. Veenstra continues: "Non-reciprocal interactions are commonplace in society and complex living systems but have long been overlooked by most physicists because they can only exist in a system out of equilibrium. By introducing non-reciproca l interactions in materials, we hope to blur the boundary between materials and machines and to create animate or lifelike materials."
Emerging TechnologiesMachine LearningNano-robotRoboticsRobotsUniversiteit van Amsterdam
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