The eight-legged creature inspired the design of the Octobot
(Mirror Daily, United States) The latest invention from Harvard University is a so-called octobot. It is a robot whose designed was inspired by octopuses, and it can be interpreted as a new statement on how technology finds its most inspirational models in nature.
The octobot has, obviously, eight legs, but the curious thing about it is another one, namely that it is soft. This new kind of robot can turn into a prototype of future robots, as it simulates textures. In addition to this, the moves it makes are also similar to those that flesh and blood organism make.
John A. Paulson, George Whitesides, and Robert Wood were part of the research and engineers’ team. They released several details on the process of creation of the octobot. It was partially generated with the help of 3D printing and scanning. The soft robot is autonomous, and also uses hydrogen peroxide as its power source. For the time being, the robot can only move its many arms around, but engineers are working on improvements that will make the robot use much more functions.
The developers behind the project are aware of the fact that this is a highly important discovery in the field, as there have been many previous attempts at designing and creating a soft robot. John A. Paulson declared the following:
“One long-standing vision for the field of soft robotics has been to create robots that are entirely soft, but the struggle has always been in replacing rigid components like batteries and electronic controls with analogous soft systems and then putting it all together. This research demonstrates that we can easily manufacture the key components of a simple, entirely soft robot, which lays the foundation for more complex designs.”
Researcher Robert Wood also released a statement, according to TechChruch:
“The struggle has always been in replacing rigid components like batteries and electronic controls with analogous soft systems and then putting it all together. This research demonstrates that we can easily manufacture the key components of a simple, entirely soft robot, which lays the foundation for more complex designs.”
As we could have expected it, the researchers and engineers don’t intend to stop here. The bot resembling an octopus is only the beginning of what octobot technology can achieve.
The new study was published in Nature (journal) on August 24.
Image courtesy of: Wikipedia