Boxy metal machines with computers for eyes and a choppy mechanical voice only describe a tiny sliver of the robots penetrating society today. Today we’ve got super-lifelike robots, artistic robots, animal-like robots, robots in space, in the military, robots that do your chores for you, robots that do your job for you, robots that can save your life, and robots that can kill you.
And if that's all not reason enough to reevaluate our 20th century sci-fi image of what a “robot” is, now robots are getting soft. As in, squishy, bendy, flexible—made of silicone rubber and powered by fluid and air.
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The field of soft robotics is advancing fast, and this month made waves when MIT released a video of its soft, agile robofish that can autonomously move just like a regular fish. Today, another aquatic robotic prototype made its debut: the Glaucus, named after a blue sea slug, which is just what it looks like.
Glaucus is an open-source semi-autonomous bot developed at Super Releaser, a soft robotics research lab. After a year of prototyping with 3D printers, the team released a video today of the machine-creature walking on its own, and it is some pretty creepy stuff. Cutting-edge, sure, but creepy.
The roboslug deforms and bends its body to propel itself forward, verrry slowly. "It has hollow interior chambers that interdigitate with one another,” the project site explains. “When either of these chambers is pressurized it deforms and bends the structure of the robot. This bending produces the walking motion.”
Back at MIT, the bio-inspired swimming robot runs on carbon dioxide, and future prototypes will be powered by water. The still-nameless “soft fish” can swim for up to 30 minutes and convulse to reverse direction in a split second (100 milliseconds, to be exact), just like real fish does when it's trying to escape danger.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/soft-robots-are-even-creepier-than-hard-ones
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