The researchers proved that their method works by making a gripper, a robotic hand and an artificial muscle with self-healing properties. In the video above, you can see a robotic hand repair itself after being stabbed. That's made possible by the material the team used to make the robot: jelly-like rubbery polymers with lots of strands that reorganize and lock together when heat is present.

This self-healing property could lead to soft robots' deployment in factories to handle fruits and other delicate items, as well as to their use for actual search-and-rescue missions. The team's current model still requires someone else to apply heat to a robot's wounds, though. To create truly low-maintenance soft machines, the researchers are now finding a way to automatically trigger their self-healing mechanism. They could either tweak the polymers so that they can repair themselves with no external input or find a way for robots to apply heat to their own damaged components.