There is an interesting comment from Alfonso Parra Rubio of MIT. I think it’s pretty obvious why, but when we think about technology, it tends to be a bit…either/or. Indeed, we’ve traditionally viewed soft robots as diametrically opposed to their more traditional counterparts.
But the organic presence that inspires them is often a combination of stiffness and weakness. After all, who are we if we are not bundles of soft tissue bound to a rigid skeletal structure? increase.
Image credit: and
This is one of the guiding principles in MIT’s recent reimagining of the underwater snake-like aquabot. Robots are mostly hollow, built from modular voxels that can be assembled to create systems that are rigid in certain directions and soft in others, combining rigid and flexible elements.
MIT professor Michael Triantafyllou, who was previously involved in MIT’s RoboTuna project, said:
So far, the system has been configured in the 1-meter-long eel-like design seen in this post, but modular building blocks can create a variety of shapes and scale the size of the robot significantly. means that it can be expanded to
“There have been many snake-like robots before,” says fellow MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld. It’s made out of components.”
Modularity could also mean dramatically reducing the assembly time required to build these robots. His 60 parts of this system were put together in two days instead of the two years it took him to build RoboTuna.
