Soft Robots

Why should robots be inflexible, rigid in their movement through the world, and fail when only a single component fails? Biological organisms (in general) do better than this. Soft robots promise to bring extreme robustness to the robotic world but designing optimized freeform soft robots is neither easy nor intuitive. Using genetic algorithms, the blueprint for locomotion-optimized robots can be generated automatically. The video below shows the results for an automatically designed locomoting soft robot. There are two materials: one that expands and contracts periodically and another that is passive. The design phase took approximately 2 days on a singe quad-core computer. The voxelized shape of the robot was then fabricated with minimal human dexterity by laser cutting the contours of each material of each layer with alignment holes and gluing them together with silicone sealant. The materials are open-cell and closed-cell silicone foam and actuation is achieved by modulating the environmental pressure. Although actuation is not on board at this point, the concept of fully amorphous locomotion has been demonstrated on a robot that costs less than $1 in materials and can be stomped on without breaking it.