Soft robots given more agility

Led by Kirstin Petersen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University, the team took advantage of a property of liquids and gasses that had previously hindered the movement of fluid-driven soft robots. The team’s paper - Harnessing Nonuniform Pressure Distributions in Soft Robotic Actuators – has been published in Advanced Intelligent Systems.

“Soft robots have a very simple structure, but can have much more flexible functionality than their rigid cousins. They’re sort of the ultimate embodied intelligent robot,” Petersen said in a statement. “Most soft robots these days are fluid-driven. In the past, most people have looked at how we could get extra bang for our bucks by embedding functionality into the robot material, like the elastomer. Instead, we asked ourselves how we could do more with less by utilising how the fluid interacts with that material.”

Petersen’s team connected a series of elastomer bellows with slender tubes, a configuration that allows for antagonistic motions of pulling and pushing. The tubes induce viscosity, causing the pressure to be distributed unevenly. That would normally be a problem, but the team found a way to utilise it.