The Limbo-Dancing Robot

It seems that robots with a soft touch are all the rage.

A flexible robot built by Harvard scientists that can wiggle and worm through tight gaps is the latest prototype in the growing field of soft-bodied machines.

The inspiration for it came from squids and starfish, which deform their shapes to move around. Robots that can manoeuvre in this way could be particularly useful after a disaster like an earthquake, with rescuers able to send them through small cracks.

Shaping up to be a great innovation: The flexible robot can inflate and deflate and wiggle and squirm to allow it to move through small gaps

They could also be deployed on battlefields where the terrain would be too rough for more conventional rigid machines.

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'The unique ability for soft robots to deform allows them to go places that traditional rigid-body robots cannot,’ Matthew Walter, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an email to the Associated Press. A team from Tufts University earlier this year showed off a four-inch (10-centimetre) caterpillar-shaped robot made of silicone rubber that can curl into a ball and propel itself forward.

The Harvard project, funded by the Pentagon's research arm, was described online yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new robot, which took two months to construct, is five inches (12.7 centimetres) long. Its four legs can be separately controlled by pumping air into the limbs, either manually or via computer. This gives the robot a range of motions including crawling and slithering.
The researchers, led by chemist George M Whitesides, tested the robot's flexibility by having it squirm underneath a pane of glass just three-quarters of an inch from the surface.
Scientists maneuvered the robot through the tiny gap 15 times using a combination of movements. In most cases, it took less than a minute to get from side to side.
Researchers eventually want to improve the robot's speed, but were pleased that it did not break from constant inflation and deflation.
‘It was tough enough to survive,’ said Harvard postdoctoral fellow Robert Shepherd, adding that the robot can traverse on a variety of surfaces including felt cloth, gravel, mud and even Jell-O.
There were drawbacks, though. The robot is tethered to an external power source and scientists need to find a way to integrate the source before it can be deployed in the real world.
‘There are many challenges to actively moving soft robots and no easy solutions,’ Tufts neurobiologist Barry Trimmer, who worked on the caterpillar robot, said in an email.
Robotics researcher Carmel Majidi, who heads the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, said the latest robot is innovative even as it builds on previous work.
‘It's a simple concept, but they're getting lifelike biological motions,’ he said.
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