Credit: S. Morin, Harvard University.

The remarkable flexibility and color-changing capabilities of the cuttlefish, an animal renowned for its ability to change shape and appearance to hide from predators, are one step closer to being replicated in robots.

A new flexible, color-shifting “soft robot” microfluidics networks – super small, interconnected fluid channels that can hold either gas or liquid –control color and pattern changes as well as movement, which create camouflage. The networks, embedded in sheets of silicon, are placed on the surface of soft robots. The research was done in the lab of George Whitesides at Harvard, and were inspired by nature, but published in Science.

“These strategies begin to imitate the functions, although not the anatomies, of color-changing animals,” the authors write in their paper.