Origami Muscles for Robots

[Recusant]

Kind of poetic, I think. There is a link to the full paper in the quoted text below.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/241349581[/vimeo]

"Artificial muscles give soft robots superpowers" | Wyss Institute

Soft robotics has made leaps and bounds over the last decade as researchers around the world have experimented with different materials and designs to allow once rigid, jerky machines to bend and flex in ways that mimic and can interact more naturally with living organisms. However, increased flexibility and dexterity has a trade-off of reduced strength, as softer materials are generally not as strong or resilient as inflexible ones, which limits their use.

Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created origami-inspired artificial muscles that add strength to soft robots, allowing them to lift objects that are up to 1,000 times their own weight using only air or water pressure, giving much-needed strength to soft robots. The study is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"We were very surprised by how strong the actuators [aka, "muscles"] were. We expected they'd have a higher maximum functional weight than ordinary soft robots, but we didn't expect a thousand-fold increase. It's like giving these robots superpowers," says Daniela Rus, Ph.D., the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and one of the senior authors of the paper.

[Continues . . .]

[Dave]

Like it!

Does not yet solve the problem of having to lug a pump/extractor plus power source around, but with carbon fibre "bones" going in the right direction. One step at a time.