Soft Robots

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Robots aren’t usually soft and squidgy. But inspired by the octopus, engineers are creating robots that can twist their way around problems that rigid robots can’t handle.

Feature: The soft touch
http://www.nature.com/news/meet-the-soft-cuddly-robots-of-the-future-1.19285

OCTOPUS – http://www.octopusproject.eu/
STIFF-FLOP – http://www.stiff-flop.eu/
PoseiDRONE – http://sssa.marinerobotics.it/research/activegrants/01_PoseiDRONE.php


Meet the World’s First Completely Soft Robot

Researchers use an ingenious design to make a soft robot that moves on its own.

by Julia Sklar December 8, 2016

The “octobot” is a squishy little robot that fits in the palm of your hand and looks like something in a goody bag from a child’s birthday party. But despite its quirky name and diminutive size, this bot represents an astonishing advance in robotics.

According to the Harvard researchers who created it, it’s the first soft robot that is completely self-contained. It has no hard electronic components—no batteries or computer chips—and moves without being tethered to a computer.

The octobot is basically a pneumatic tube with a very cute exterior. To make it move, hydrogen peroxide—much more concentrated than the kind in your medicine cabinet—is pumped into two reservoirs inside the middle of the octobot’s body. Pressure pushes the liquid through tubes inside the body, where it eventually hits a line of platinum, catalyzing a reaction that produces a gas. From there, the gas expands and moves through a tiny chip known as a microfluidic controller. It alternately directs the gas down one half of the octobot’s tentacles at a time.

The alternating release of gas is what makes the bot do what looks like a little dance, wiggling its tentacles up and down and moving around in the process. The octobot can move for about eight minutes on one milliliter of fuel.

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