What?
Robots that can turn into cars, planes or sometimes even mechanical dinosaurs.
Where seen?
In the eighties cartoon and modern film series Transformers starring giant robots that can turn into all kinds of vehicles.
How close are we?
The robots in Transformers are not man-made, but aliens from the distant planet Cybertron. And while you can never completely rule out the possibility that extraterrestrial life resembles giant toy robots, the chance is so small that we don’t have to speculate about it further.
But if we put the alien and the self-conscious aside for a moment, is what you’re left with even possible? Can you build robots that turn into vehicles? The lame answer is: they already exist. The cartoon was in a sense a long advertisement for the toy of the same name. In the 1980s, all you had to do was walk into the nearest toy store and find an Optimus Prime, a toy robot that turns into a truck.
So the main question is: can it go even bigger? The answer is yes to that too. For example, a group of Japanese engineers and scientists working together under the name “Project J-deite” started with a scale model – a quarter the size of the film – of Transformer character Bumblebee, which could actually turn into a car that actually drives. And in they presented the successor, codenamed: J-deite Ride, which is 4 meters tall and can do the same.
And there are more. The Humvee Bioloid, for example, developed by an engineer at the American university Virgina Tech, which can transform from a Humvee into a robot and then do a little dance. And then the same group also developed a so-called ‘soft drone’ at the beginning of this year, which can change shape thanks to a metal alloy that becomes liquid when you heat it to 60 degrees. In this way, it transforms from a ground vehicle into an air vehicle, and even into a rudimentary submarine, the research group wrote earlier this year. in the trade magazine Science Robotics†
Also be interesting the M blocks developed by the American university MIT. These are block-shaped mini robots that recognize each other, can cling together and thus take on different shapes. And although it is of course not so easy to make a car from separate blocks, everyone who has ever played with Lego knows: it is possible.
If you ultimately prefer something that already turns into a real car, then you can always contact the Turkish company Letrons in addition to the Japanese and American autobots. They built ‘Antimon’, a real car from the BMW-3 series that can turn into a robot in half a minute. And vice versa, of course.
Very impressive, but unfortunately not yet very ‘Transformers’. For example, you cannot drive the car yourself, although you can control it remotely. It just doesn’t go very fast: you can get at most 20 kilometers per hour with it. And oh yes: in robot form, unlike the fighting robots from the cartoon, unfortunately he can’t walk either. Let alone fly, or shoot huge laser pistols with megalomaniacs.