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Meet the Soft, Cuddly Robots of the Future (nature.com)
turkeydance writes with a link to an article at Nature exploring the squishier side of robots research. Rather than conventional (and rigid) materials and architectures for robots, soft robot researchers are building bots that employ materials that fluidly bend, stretch, roll, and squeeze, more along the lines of an octopus than an industrial claw; some of the ones featured in the article (and shown in an accompanying video) are explicitly based on octopus movement. "Think about how hard it is to tie shoelaces," says Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "That's the kind of capability we'd like to have in robotics."
I sure hope that robots are nice and soft and cuddly and squeezable. I wouldn't want to bruise or injure myself while using them.
I saw a robot like this a few years ago in Japan. It was humanoid, child size. It was shaking hands with children and they seemed very relaxed with it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
32C3 -> "My robot will crush you with its soft delicate hands" about soft robotics https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
They want an animated Real Doll, preferably something that maintains a human body temperature.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I just want the robots to be soft and squishy and look exactly like Isabel Lucas.
https://obxe.files.wordpress.c...
You are welcome on my lawn.
As so often, Douglas Adams saw the future, courtesy here of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. 'Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!' Share and enjoy!
We are nowhere near making a robotic manipulator with even half the abilities of the human hand. Not only can it be moved in a fairly astounding range, but its sensor capabilities are phenomenal. When I am soldering or doing automotive repair, each hand often does two or three different things at once! e.g. hold this, twist that, pull on this other thing, hold that out of the way, sense which way this thing is pointed, feel out the place where the part goes... Lots of people are making soft robots, but nobody is even vaguely close to demonstrating a prototype of a sensor as versatile as your fingertip.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sounds like Rucker's quad book series: Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware maybe making the light of day.
Beware the moldies and ridicule the cheeseballers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I for one welcome our new soft cuddly robot overlords.