ITVoice News: A new kind of untethered, soft robot is being developed by a team of researchers from Harvard and Cornell University. This robot is able to walk using four legs and when it commutes its shapes also get changed.
This autonomous robot has some awesome features including its ability to operate through puddles of water or a snowstorm and it can bear limited exposure to heat and if it’s run over by an automobile then also the robots feels fine. A paper, titled ‘A Resilient, Untethered Soft Robot’, has been published by Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, at Harvard University and the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, and this paper details about their research work.
Innovative composite materials are being used by researchers in fabricating this soft robot like silicone elastomer, polyaramid fabric and hollow glass microspheres. This robot is able to carry miniature air compressors, battery pack, valves and controller. The robot is able to facilitate its autonomous operation. Some new fabrication techniques have been developed too to create its soft body with modified Pneu-Net actuators. The robot’s body is designed in a way so that it stays resilient to adverse environmental conditions as mentioned earlier.
This is a quadrupedal soft robot which walks at a speed of 18m/hr on a flat surface. It’s also capable of audio and video sensing. The experimental design is at a prototype stage and the team shares that selection of elements and therefore the design doesn’t represent a full optimised set for any specific application. The team is quite confident a complete family of these robots can be developed by them. This technology of creating soft robotics is pretty new but it’s picking up its pace quite fast too. Check out the video below:
