Soft robots resemble octopus, moving in a narrow environment

Recently, MIT's Artificial Science and Computer Science Laboratory (CSAIL) has introduced a soft robot with an octopus design with the ability to crawl flexibly in narrow environments like pipes without need a driver. This robot will be performed by CSAIL at the International Intelligent Robot Systems and Conference (IROS) conference this week.

The robot is made of silicon rubber material in 3D printed mold and is the latest robot of a soft robot research project led by CSAIL director Daniel Rus. The goal of the project is to expand the field of soft robots because they hold the potential for safer, higher elasticity and more efficient than hard-robot in certain jobs.

The flexibility of traditional hard-robot is limited to joints or joints. They cannot move in confined spaces and need to be programmed extremely accurately to avoid collision with terrain. In contrast, the deformable structure of soft robots makes it easier for them to squeeze into narrow spots and move faster. In addition, soft robots also have higher elasticity to resist collision and can even exploit collisions to gather information about the surrounding environment.

Back to CSAIL's octopus robot , the team led by graduate student Andrew Marchese, Robert Katzschmann and director Daniel Rus developed complex algorithms that help determine the necessary curvature of the robot body, helping Robots perform many different motions.

Marchese said: "To put a robot in a fixed point in space, you need to set up a curve of the landmarks needed for the robot to move and this is not easy. Imagine When moving into a narrow space like a pipe, robots need to have landmarks to approach during the migration process, which makes our development program much more complicated. "

Soft robots possess a lot of potential but the field is still very new and researchers are still looking for the best approaches to solve problems such as moving and setting diagrams. For example, CSAIL's octopus robot is very soft so it cannot use conventional motors. Instead, CSAIL's team created hollow channels, which can be extended to both sides of the robot so that when compressed with gas, the tension will be placed on the flexible silicon, making the robot change its shape like a ball. inflate, thereby allowing the robot to bend to one side.

Although it is a soft robot, it still contains hardware components such as high-pressure regulators and aluminum parts to hold components together. Marchese said: "Removing most of the hardware components in robot design makes us think of a more difficult question. Can we effectively use a robot with a soft body like gum?"

The robot is the latest step in CSAIL's series of research and can be used for many different tasks from handling laboratory specimens to supporting less invasive surgeries. The next version of the robot will integrate a "hand " so that it can grasp and place objects.

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