A squishy robot based on a starfish has pushed the frontiers of robotic movement by proving bots can wriggle.
Built out of elastomers and powered by pneumatics, the soft robot successfully squeezed itself through a 2cm gap in a test by the Harvard engineers who created it.
The boffins have cunningly worked air chambers into the robot's soft skin which inflate like balloons to power the plastic muscles: the legs curl and expand to inch the air-filled pseudo-sea-creature along.
The starfish-inspired robot wriggles under a sheet of glass
The soft parts of the robot allow it to wriggle in a way that rigid structures can't, but the basic mechanism is simple. The engineers revealed in a published article how simple actuators - the engines of the device - work together to produce the complex movements:
The paper Multigait soft robot, contributed by George M. Whitesides, is published in the journal PNAS. ®
Built out of elastomers and powered by pneumatics, the soft robot successfully squeezed itself through a 2cm gap in a test by the Harvard engineers who created it.
The boffins have cunningly worked air chambers into the robot's soft skin which inflate like balloons to power the plastic muscles: the legs curl and expand to inch the air-filled pseudo-sea-creature along.
The starfish-inspired robot wriggles under a sheet of glassIt uses no sensors, only five actuators, and a simple pneumatic valving system that operates at low pressures (< 10 psi). A combination of crawling and undulation gaits allowed this robot to navigate a difficult obstacle.Another advantage of squishy bots over rigid or metallic ones is that they are less prone to breaking and are more resistant to damage from falls, though their soft-walled air chambers face a greater risk of punctures.
The paper Multigait soft robot, contributed by George M. Whitesides, is published in the journal PNAS. ®
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