Origami robots run only on air
February 15, 2012 | Source: Wired Science
Soft pneumatic actuators based on composites consisting of elastomers with embedded sheet or fiber structures that are flexible but not extensible combine soft lithography, for fabrication, with the principles of origami, for structural design. These actuators respond to pressurization with a wide range of motions, such as bending, extension, contraction, and twisting. (Credit: Ramses V. Martinez et al./Advanced Functional Materials)
Powered by puffs of air, “soft” robots molded from paper and silicone rubber can bend, twist, grip and even lift more than 100 times their weight.
The pneumatic prototypes contain no electronics yet (to be added in the future). But their creators, funded by DARPA, imagine applications where a soft-bot might be the best tool.
“If you want to go through a winding tube or rubble or some other tough environment that’s difficult to reach, you need to be flexible,” said chemist Xin Chen of Boston University, a member of a team who describes their work in a Feb. 9 Advanced Functional Materials paper.
The military is interested in such robots as weapons or spying devices, and in scaling down to microscopic or nanoscopic versions.
Ref.: Ramses V. Martinez et al., Elastomeric Origami: Programmable Paper-Elastomer Composites as Pneumatic Actuators, Advanced Functional Materials, 2012 [DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201102978]
