It is true that many are the companies that today are dedicated, practically full time, to work on increasingly capable robots. Thanks to this we meet the impressive creatures, for example, from Boston Dynamics. On the other hand, the truth is that there are already many companies capable of offering products like this, so the real challenge is to miniaturization of all these elements and even for the elimination of all kinds of moving parts.
The real motivation for the latter, as many engineers and researchers argue, is to develop and manufacture robots that can perform complex tasks at a time. price, both acquisition and maintenance, reasonable. This can only be achieved by making this type of creature much smaller and, above all, by eliminating a large part of its moving parts, a task that is much more complex than we can imagine.
MIT creates the smallest hydraulic pump in the world.
This is where a group of researchers from the MIT has been working to eliminate moving parts and, for that, they decided to be inspired by what they themselves have dubbed the most effective hydraulic pumps on the planet, the trees. If we develop this idea a little further, what these scientists refer to is the way in which these living beings feed themselves, by which they can constantly send water from the base to the top of their branches.
Inside the trees there is a complex system full of conductive tissues called xylem and phloem which, thanks to a surface tension between water and the imbalance of sugar levels, produce stable pumping. This may seem simple, at least on a theoretical level as has been shown countless times, unfortunately if we do it in a practical way the result is not a constant flow.
To solve this problem at MIT they have discovered that the leaves of the trees, in turn, provide this system, via photosynthesis, sugar which makes, if you add to your system an additional source of sugars it offers a constant flow without the need for moving parts or installing pumps of any kind.