Harvard creates the world’s first autonomous and untethered soft robot

So researchers have been working on building soft (or at least softer) robots for decades, and they’ve been getting better and better over time.

This means that even though the Octobot is entirely soft, it doesn’t need to be linked to an off-board computer with normal rigid components in order to receive inputs and execute actions-something that many previous soft robots had to do.

It’s called the “Octobot”.

The team controls the reactions using a soft logic circuit that acts as a circuit board. This bot’s components are all soft and it has come to redefine robots as you have known it.

The palm-sized robot was built using a combination of molding for the body and 3D printing for the legs. “The octobot is a simple embodiment created to demonstrate our integrated design and additive fabrication strategy for embedding autonomous functionality”.

So how is it powered? We could potentially see intelligent micro soft robots used inside of the human body for a variety of applications or exploring the depths of the world’s oceans in places almost impossible to reach.

“Fuel sources for soft robots have always relied on some type of rigid components”, said Michael Wehner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Wood lab and co-first author of the paper. The moving parts are connected to a network of channels that send liquid fuel (a hydrogen peroxide solution) to mix with a platinum-based catalyst in certain reaction chambers. The researchers opted for a microfluidic logic circuit that possessed a soft analog of a simple electronic oscillator. As the fuel decomposes, it releases pressurized oxygen that inflates the actuators, allowing the octobot to move.

It can be produced cheaply by a 3-D printer.

Now that the researchers have discovered such a simple solution, they plan to upgrade the robot by providing it with new skills, such as crawling, swimming and interacting.

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“This research is a proof of concept”, said Harvard grad student and researcher Ryan Truby. By creating its own very first autonomous soft robot, the research team try to demonstrate that soft robotics could have a dramatic impact that might revolutionize the way that machines and humans interact.