The technology is being compared to the liquid metal used for the T-1000 in the movie Terminator 2. While it is a long way from liquid metal the new material developed Professor Anette Hosoi and her team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could allow robots to alter their shape to fit into tight spaces.

The material uses a springy foam core inside a coating of wax. At normal temperatures the material is very firm but, if it needs to change shape, it can be heated with an embedded wire. As the wax gets hot it softens, allowing it to change shape and then become solid again when the wire cools. The pliability of the wax will even allow robots to repair themselves.

“This material is self-healing. So if you push it too far and fracture the coating, you can heat it and then cool it, and the structure returns to its original configuration,” said Holsoi to Network World.

Possible applications for the new material include medical devices, which change shape to travel to hard to reach places and search and rescue robots that can easily maneuver around rubble or wreckage.

Because the material is inexpensive it could potentially be put to work very rapidly.

“A lot of materials innovation can be very expensive, but in this case you could just buy really low-cost polyurethane foam and some wax from a craft store,” said Hosoi’s former grad student, Nadia Cheng.

The material, which was developed with Google owned robotics company Boston Dynamics, was originally produced by placing polyurethane foam in melted wax according to MIT News. The researchers found, however, that using a 3D printed version of the polyurethane structure resulted in a material that was easier to analyze. The researchers till believe that the first version would work for simple applications.