Modular Eel Robots Combine Soft and Hard Components • TechCrunch

[ad_1]

Here is an interesting comment from Alfonso Parra Rubio of MIT, Treating soft versus hard robotics is a false dichotomy. For, I suppose, obvious reasons, thinking about technology tends to be a bit binary. Certainly we have traditionally viewed soft robots as something that exists in direct opposition to their more traditional counterparts.

But the organic beings that inspire them are often a combination of stiff and soft. After all, what are we but a bunch of soft tissue bonded to a rigid skeletal structure. It follows, then, that roboticists would do well to marry the two, in order to take advantage of the best of both worlds.

Image credits: MIT

This is one of the guiding principles behind MIT’s recent rethink of its snake-like underwater aquabots. The robot is largely hollow, built with modular voxels that can be assembled to create systems that are rigid in certain directions and soft in others, combining rigid and flexible elements.

The soft pliability of the body surface allows us to implement flow control that can reduce drag and improve propulsive efficiency, resulting in significant fuel savings, says MIT professor Michael Triantafyllou, formerly involved with MIT’s RoboTuna project.

So far, the system has been configured in the kind of meter-long eel design seen in this post, but the modular building blocks allow you to create a variety of different shapes and increase the size of the robots considerably.

There have been many snake-like robots before, adds fellow MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld. But they’re usually made with custom-made components, as opposed to these simple building blocks which are scalable.

Modularity also potentially means drastically reducing the assembly time needed to build these robots. The 60-piece system was assembled in two days, rather than the two years it took to build RoboTuna.

[ad_2]