Frozen Assets: Leveraging Ice, Water, and Phase Transitions in Robots

Robots are especially useful in cold, remote, and inhospitable environments such as polar regions and extraterrestrial settings. Due to subfreezing temperatures and limited resources in these environments, robots made of ice are particularly advantageous. In this paper we demonstrate how the solid and liquid phases of water, and transitions between these phases, can be leveraged into common robot designs for modular robots, robot arms, rovers, and soft robots. We explore how robots can utilize structural elements made of ice and exploit the phase change between ice and water to augment their capabilities. Additionally, we do a scaling analysis of ice structural elements to provide insight on their performance at different length scales and ambient temperatures.