Soft Robots Given Veins The Let Them Change Their Stripes

If it were alive this robot would be classified as an invertebrate. It lacks a backbone and interestingly enough, all other bones are missing as well. The Harvard researchers that developed it call it a soft robot. It’s made out of silicone and uses pathways built into the substance to move. By adding pressurized air to these pathways the appendages flex relative to each other. In fact, after the break you can see a video of a starfish-shaped soft robot picking up an egg.

Now they’ve gone one step further. By adding another layer to the top, or even embedding it in the body, the robot gains the ability to change color. Above you can see a soft robot that started without any color (other than the translucent white of the silicone) and is now being changed to red. As the dye is injected it is propagating from the right side to the left. The team believes this could be useful in a swarm robotics situation. If you have a slew of these things searching for something in the dark they could pump glowing dye through their skin when they’ve found it. The demo can be seen after the jump.

Picking up an egg

Changing color

[Thanks Bill]

21 thoughts on “Soft Robots Given Veins The Let Them Change Their Stripes

  1. …I keep telling myself I’m going to stop leaving comments regarding spelling and grammar errors, but seriously- read the headline for this article…

    “Soft robots given veins the let them change their stripes.”

    …and tell me what kind of sense it makes without first deciphering it. I understand it’s a simple mistake of using ‘the’ in the place of ‘that’. But something tells me that someone needs to modify their workflow. Maybe insert a ‘read’ between ‘write’ and ‘post’. And I mean _read_ it and not just look for red squiggly underlines.

    1. heh and I would never have noticed had you not pointed it out, my internal text to audio decoder fixed it for me, god Iv’e spent way to much time reading internet articles if my brain works like that.

  2. Scary veiny bots now, cylons by next year… Combine this tech with the android from the other day and soon skin jobs will be running around thinking they’re real.

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