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Soft Robot Stanford

The nineties were full of toys and consumer products that were, in hindsight, so bad it's a wonder we as a gild haven't facepalmed ourselves to death yet. The road to marketing hell is paved with skilful intentions. Ane memorable toy from the collective childhood of my generation is the water wiggler — otherwise known as the water tube toy, water ophidian, or those weird squidgy jelly tube things. Remember these? Sometimes they had glitter in them, or tiny plastic fish. Yous'd effort to hold them, and they'd slip right through your hands even though you had a secure grip on the outside.

Just phallic enough to make an developed vaguely uncomfortable, water wigglers were ubiquitous for a few years, and patently now they're inspiring robot design. Applied robotics researchers at Stanford have developed a soft-bodied robot that can turn itself within out, and they hope to utilise it for disaster relief.

Oh yeah. These monuments to human regret. Withal sold at dollar stores everywhere.

What makes the new techno-tentacle work then well is exactly that principle of turning itself inside out. It's fabricated of a long, double-walled plastic tube filled with pressurized air — topologically, it's a torus, a donut. This gives information technology a unique advantage when it comes to pathfinding, which the new robot can do with eerie smoothness.

"The trunk lengthens equally the fabric extends from the end just the residual of the body doesn't move," said Elliot Hawkes, a visiting assistant professor from the Academy of California, Santa Barbara and lead writer of the paper. "The trunk tin be stuck to the environs or jammed betwixt rocks, just that doesn't stop the robot because the tip tin continue to progress as new fabric is added to the end."

This friction-independent movement means that the robot can grow and pathfind like the end of a living vine, snaking its way over, around and through terrain with the greatest of ease. It lifted a 100kg crate, then slipped through a gap only a 10th its own bore. During its trials, the bot grew through the whole length of an obstacle course, where information technology navigated through flypaper, gum, nails and an ice wall to deliver a CO2 sensor payload, which could potentially sense the exhaled carbon dioxide produced past trapped survivors. It coiled into an upright spiral, which then broadcast a radio signal.

Nigh fantastical of all, the bot "successfully completed this class even though it was punctured by the nails, considering the expanse that was punctured didn't keep to movement and, as a upshot, self-sealed by staying on top of the nail," Stanford said in a statement.

Run into your new softbot overlord.

Some prototypes were capable of differentially inflating the trunk of the bot, allowing its stop to curl and plough. Others pulled a cable through the tube, which could signal to a new way of laying downwards cables and wires.

The researchers also adult a software model that used image processing to decide where the bot should navigate, assuasive it semi-autonomous control by style of that camera on the end. These exploits bring with them some actually fun control problems, and because it all has to exist done in real time, information technology'south aggressive. But the team is undaunted. They want to scale information technology both up and downwardly, making larger and tougher models for disaster scenarios, or smaller and more frail and dexterous versions for medical procedures like vascular surgery. And while the current prototypes accept all been made of a sparse, inexpensive plastic inflated with air, the soft bots could be made of things like ripstop nylon, or even Kevlar.

"The applications we're focusing on are those where the robot moves through a difficult environment, where the features are unpredictable and at that place are unknown spaces," said Laura Blumenschein, co-author of the paper. "If you lot tin put a robot in these environments and it's unaffected by the obstacles while it's moving, you don't demand to worry about it getting damaged or stuck every bit it explores."