Slashdot Mirror
New 'Rubber Robot' Crawls Through Small Spaces With Inflatable Limbs
JoeRobe writes "Researchers at Harvard have developed a pneumatically-controlled rubber robot that combines undulation and quadrupedal 'crawling,' allowing it to maintain a low profile while moving. In a paper published in PNAS (abstract), they describe it as a 'soft robot, composed exclusively of soft materials (elastomeric polymers), which is inspired by animals (e.g., squid, starfish, worms) that do not have hard internal skeletons.' The robot is solely powered by relatively low pressure (10 psi), and controlled by 5 pneumatic actuators. The research was funded by DARPA." The paper is also available (not paywalled) from the researchers' project site (PDF), complete with more creepy images of the squidbot.
How do you get it back out of your body?
welcome our.. oh never mind.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
One step closer to the sex robot, better get my money ready.
I can't help but think my marriage is in danger if this reaches my local Boys R Us...
who would have ever thought the worm would be described as a method to mobilize gelatinous robots
The uses for an undulating, rubber robot are staggering. When it involves quadrupedal crawling, its even better.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
New rubber, inflatable robot... needs 2nd robot to follow it and provide air lines for power source.
Still--this has real applications....
Link fail:
<a href="gmwgroup.harvard.edu
I guess that is Google Chrome's url shortening and Firefox 8's browser.urlbar.trimURLs in action.
I think my wife would like one for Christmas.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The link to the PDF in the summary is a borked link ... this one is accurate: http://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1135.pdf
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Will my robot insurance cover this?
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Now, they just need to develop a colonoscope that crawls into the colon to make it traverse the turns without applying pressure to the colon wall. A relatively painless colonoscopy which would require no sedation.
Seen it already. Nothing to see here, move along.
Presumably it has other uses other than a flawless execution of "the worm"?
The squid is the wrong cephalopod to reference here. The motion is much more octopus-like, as octopuses only have a single hard structure in their bodies, the beak, while squid and cuttlefish both have an internal shell. In the case of the cuttlefish, the cuttlebone is roughly the length and width of the cuttlefish's mantle. In the case of the squid, the pin shell is slightly less than the mantle length, and usually only a few centimeters wide, depending on the size of the animal.
Look, if it has to be tethered to an enormous power and control source, it is not a robot, it is a...what? a mechanical peripheral, at best.
I have the same basic problem with the "robot wars" stuff. If there's a guy with a controller box to one side of the arena deciding what the thing will do, it's an RC toy, not a robot.
Make it autonomous, self-propelled, and self-powered, and it's a robot. Otherwise, it's not any more of a robot than your printer is.
New 'Rubber Robot' Crawls Through Small Spaces With Inflatable Limbs
Say that sentence out loud to 5 different people on the street, be sure to 'emphasize' the relevant section. This is the best heading on slashdot in years. I must admit when I'm feeling a bit adventurous I don't mind a bit of the old 'rubber robot' you know what I'm saying?
Ok, jokes about inflatable rubber robots crawling through small spaces aside....
I imagine a kind of pneumatic (or better, hydraulic) soft bodied robot that has a kind of "fluid logic" system that squeezes off the supply lines to the "muscle chambers", and a single internal electrical contraction chamber that serves as the main pump.
Say for instance, the main pump simply squeezes a large, central space somehow, and has say, 8 output lines from that chamber. Surrounding each line is a "pinch" cell, which is a smaller version of the main pump cell, but with no output lines. When active, it constricts the fluid flow down the tube it surrounds, preventing working fluid from passing.
The tubes continue and terminate at the expansion chambers in the robot's limbs.
The computer circuitry which drives the main cell, and the 8 control cells, is tiny and self contained. Possibly an epoxy blob design. This would be the only rigid part of the robot, though it too could be flexible with the right design. (Use flexible substrate electronics, like that graphene ink approach.)
Depending on how those 8 control valves are opened or closed, the action of the main pump cycle would actuate the robot. 8 valves would give you 256 possible muscle instructions to work with.
Conceivably, you could even do "tricks" this way, by inflating a limb motor cell, then blocking the fluid return by closing the valve, to hold one part of the robot stiff, while the remaining working fluid drives some other part of the robot, to accomplish some task. An example use might be "jumping", since the release of the control valves would violently snap the muscle as the pressure released.
I could see some pretty complex movements being done this way.
The issue is how to power the robot. A laboratory test robot might walk on a special floor which doubles as an inductive charger, which powers the robot's electronics, but a real world softbody robot would something a little more real.
don't require bulky air compressors and have been around for decades, and far surpass this in strength and precision.
Electroactive polymers
Move along people, nothing to see here but balloon animals.
I don't know why, but they do.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
It looks like a tired breakdancer.
...there's a robot exhibition on now.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I have an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1940s showing a trick they used while building the Grand Coulee dam. They tied a string to a cat's tail, put the cat into the gallery, and scared it with a blast of compressed air. Cats hate the hissing sound that compressed air makes.
Perhaps a robot would be more reliable, no danger of it stopping midways to take a nap, but using cats to pull CAT5 cables seem very appropriate to me.
People, do yourself a favour and go watch the video. It does look pretty hilarious.
In some way, it reminds me of my 2-month old baby, actually.