The first fully soft autonomous robot in the world was created by Harvard scientists using a combination of 3D printing and fluid dynamics. Similar to a circuit board, a microfluid logic circuit printed inside the robot directs pressure to various robot elements as necessary (via Harvard’s Wyss Institute ). A small amount of hydrogen peroxide undergoes a chemical reaction inside the robot, which results in a comparablely huge amount of gas being produced and pumped into the limbs. The limbs can be manipulated in a variety of ways in this fashion.
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The Bat Bot, often known as B2, was reportedly created to help researchers better understand how bats move around their surroundings. However, we can’t help but question whether they only did it because it was cool.
When you wish to observe the minute nuances of how a bat moves around, they are notoriously difficult to observe. The creation of a synthetic analog enables researchers to explore to their hearts’ content without having to consider the sentiments or welfare of the target species (via Secemu ).
Surprisingly, the Bat Bot is mechanically and aesthetically effective. It is supported by an exoskeleton that somewhat resembles the skeletal design of a living bat. In addition, scientists added a flexible polymer that mimics the flexing and stretching of a bat’s wings.
The B2 flies by flapping its wings , similar to how a bat or a bird does, unlike other flying machines that depend on rotors to keep them in the air. Even though it doesn’t fly quite as well as its namesake, you might find it difficult to tell the difference if you are close to it. At least as long as you saw the darkly hued variation and not its spectral, translucent brother.
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ETH Zurich SPACEBOK Dog-shaped robots may soon travel to space, just as dogs famously entered space before humans ever did. Undoubtedly, we have dispatched a number of robots to distant planets and the blackness of space. Over the years, numerous rovers and probes have been sent into space, some even as far as interstellar space, at least in the case of the Voyager spacecrafts.
Most of those probes, like the Mars rovers, have resembled vehicles or were uniquely designed spacecraft that bear little resemblance to anything else we’ve ever created. Robots with biological inspiration present a rare chance to add something a little more active to another planet without endangering humans’ lives. But doing so comes with certain particular difficulties.
Because of the decreased gravity, when astronauts first travelled to the moon, they quickly learned that walking as they would on Earth wasn’t always the ideal way to get about (via Universe Today ). In this situation, SpaceBok is useful.
A student team from ETH Zurich and ZHAW Zurich created a quadruped robot with the goal of utilizing dynamic gaits in which all four limbs occasionally leave the ground (via ESA ). Similar gaits are sometimes used by animals on Earth because they are efficient, but until recently, the programming required to implement them in robots proved difficult. Hopefully sometime in the not too distant future, SpaceBok will be hopping on the moon, Mars, or asteroids.
