Lifelike robots are two steps closer after one team found a new way to put computation into soft robotic materials and another found a way to untether their soft robot.
There’s lots of interest in soft robotics, not only to eventually build fully lifelike robots from soft parts, but also to improve the growing sector of smart materials. Today, smart materials are pretty binary, just functioning in response to stimulus, rather than exhibiting intelligent behaviours like we see in ourselves and animals.
To be useful, Soft Matter Computers (SMCs) should mimic more complex functions, such as the workings of a vascular system, which has a number of cascade effects. For example, it allows hormones such as adrenaline to be triggered and released throughout the body, which in turn causes increased blood flow to muscles and dilation of the pupils.
3d rendering humanoid robot thinking on white background
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SMCs need to be low-cost and easily fabricated to really be useful and now, researchers from the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Engineering have demonstrated just such a mechanism for computation.
“We have taken an important step toward entirely soft, autonomous robots and for smart materials to move beyond stimulus-response relationships which could enable the intelligent behaviours seen in living organisms,” said Jonathan Rossiter, professor of robotics at the university, in a statement.
“Soft robots could become even more life-like; capable of independently adapting to their environment and demonstrating the diversity of behaviours seen in the natural world.”
The team built three different soft robots to demonstrate the power of their SMCs. The first was a soft gripper bot that had reflexes that could be programmed by adjusting the parameters of the conductive fluid receptor (CFR), The CFR is the building block of the SMC, using a fluidic input signal to map onto an electric output signal via electrodes embedded into a soft tube.
They also developed a softworm robot, in which the SMC generated signals for three different ways of moving, and a bending actuator that could exhibit three distinct behaviours by varying only one input parameter.
The full study, “A soft matter computer for soft robots”, was published in Science magazine.
Another study in Science Robotics, “Untethered soft robotic matter with passive control of shape morphing and propulsion”, featured a different breakthrough – unhooking soft robots from their wires.
The self-folding “Rollbot” is a 3D-printed bot that changes shape in response to heat and, unlike the majority of soft robots today, does not rely on a wired power source.
“Many existing soft robots require a tether to external power and control systems or are limited by the amount of force they can exert. These active hinges are useful because they allow soft robots to operate in environments where tethers are impractical and to lift objects many times heavier than the hinges,” said Connor McMahan, a graduate student at Caltech and co-first author of the paper, in a statement.
This robot was only programmed to respond in a certain way to certain temperatures, but the same material could also be programmed to respond to pH levels, humidity, light or some other external stimuli.
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