Electric power and control systems – such as batteries and circuit boards – are rigid, and until now soft-bodied robots have been either tethered to an off-board system or rigged with hard components.
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A team at Harvard University has created a robot – actually about 300 of them, since they are so cheap to make – that is opposite of the common view of a robot. It’s the circuit that uses fluid pressure rather than electricity within the octobot that has researchers excited about the potential future of soft robotics.
The small robot, dubbed “octobot” and described in an upcoming paper in the journal Nature, could open the door for a new era of totally soft, autonomous drones- revolutionizing how we think about and interact with machines.
“Through our hybrid assembly approach, we were able to 3D print each of the functional components required within the soft robot body, including the fuel storage, power and actuation, in a rapid manner”, said Jennifer A Lewis, from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
Octopuses have always been a source of inspiration in soft robotics.
This dinky octopus isn’t your average sea creature.
That’s not the painful case with Octobot, which fits in the palm of a hand. This makes it an ideal model for soft robots that strive to go beyond mechanical worms, but there’s more to making a soft robot than choosing an animal to mimic.
“One thing that’s been missing so far has been putting them all together”, Prof Rossiter told the BBC, adding that the octobot would be a springboard for others in the field.
Initially it was supposed to be a spider, but the team wanted both swimming and crawling and it looked more like an octopus, Lewis said. That movement is pneumatic, powered by gas derived from hydrogen peroxide, the robot’s fuel.
For the first time, a soft robot has been built that moves on its own with no batteries or cables.
They crafted neutrally-charged gold skeletons that mimic the stingray’s shape, which were overlaid with a thin layer of stretchy polymer to give it flexibility and shrug off the water.
The aptly named “Octobot” was created at Harvard University and is the first of its kind.
When stimulated, the cardiomyocytes contract the fins downward to begin the wave movement. In that meantime, they are working on how to get the robot to swim, crawl, and otherwise interact with its environment.
It can be printed cheaply by the 3-D printer with the most costly part a really small bit of platinum. Aside from that it is essentially like bathroom caulk, “a rubbery-type object”, Lewis said.
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For years roboticists have been looking into using softer materials for parts rather than the usual metal and plastic – sometimes even building entirely soft robots.
