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If there's one thing we've learnt from Samsung's exploding phone fiasco, it's that technology can get very hot when it's under a lot of strain.

Just as the human body heats up during exercise, machines generate heat when they are being made to work hard.

This is especially true in the case of humanoid robots, which constantly place high demands on their motors so that they can move around.

The problem with heat is that it can hinder performance - in both humans and machines.

Now researchers from the University of Tokyo have developed a robot called Kengoro that can "sweat", enabling it do push-ups for 11 minutes straight without burning out its motors.

Unlike a normal water-cooled radiator system, liquid flows into porous aluminum bones and then evaporates to cool Kengoro's motors, in the same way that sweat cools a human.

Kengoro's metal structure is built from aluminum, using a technique called laser sintering, which is similar to 3D printing.

This creates "bones" with a porous honeycomb-like structure that can retain water, and then let it seep our and evaporate as the robot heats up.

Kengoro can run for half a day on about a cup of water, although it has to keep itself hydrated for the cooling to be effective.

Testing shows that this method of cooling works three times better than air cooling, and significantly better than just circulating water through interior pipes.

"Usually the frame of a robot is only used to support forces," lead author Toyotaka Kozuki told IEEE Spectrum.

"Our concept was adding more functions to the frame, using it to transfer water, release heat, and at the same time support forces."

The researchers' paper, “Skeletal Structure with Artificial Perspiration for Cooling by Latent Heat for Musculoskeletal Humanoid Kengoro,” was presented this week at IROS 2016 in Daejeon, Korea.