New 'Rubber Robot' Crawls Through Small Spaces With Inflatable Limbs 56
JoeRobe writes "Researchers at Harvard have developed a pneumatically-controlled rubber robot that combines undulation and quadrupedal 'crawling,' allowing it to maintain a low profile while moving. In a paper published in PNAS (abstract), they describe it as a 'soft robot, composed exclusively of soft materials (elastomeric polymers), which is inspired by animals (e.g., squid, starfish, worms) that do not have hard internal skeletons.' The robot is solely powered by relatively low pressure (10 psi), and controlled by 5 pneumatic actuators. The research was funded by DARPA." The paper is also available (not paywalled) from the researchers' project site (PDF), complete with more creepy images of the squidbot.
Slightly less broken link ... (Score:5, Informative)
The link to the PDF in the summary is a borked link ... this one is accurate: http://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1135.pdf [harvard.edu]
I'd like to point out... (Score:4, Informative)
The squid is the wrong cephalopod to reference here. The motion is much more octopus-like, as octopuses only have a single hard structure in their bodies, the beak, while squid and cuttlefish both have an internal shell. In the case of the cuttlefish, the cuttlebone is roughly the length and width of the cuttlefish's mantle. In the case of the squid, the pin shell is slightly less than the mantle length, and usually only a few centimeters wide, depending on the size of the animal.