Combustible gases provide power to leaping soft robots

Soft robots have already been designed to stand, walk, wriggle under obstacles but the ability to jump could one day prove critical in allowing them to avoid obstacles during search and rescue operations. The research is described in a paper published in Angewandte Chemie.

‘Initially, our soft robot systems used pneumatic pressure to actuate,’ said Robert Shepherd, first author of the paper, former postdoctoral researcher in the Whitesides Research Group at Harvard, and now an assistant professor at Cornell. ‘While that system worked, it was rather slow - it took on the order of a second. Using combustion, however, allows us to actuate the robots very fast.’

Pneumatic robots are connected to tubing that pumps air, whilst the jumping robots are connected to tubes that deliver a precisely controlled mix of methane and oxygen. Using high-voltage wires embedded in each leg of the robot, researchers deliver a spark to ignite the gases, causing a small explosion that sends the robot into the air.