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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!”
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/...