Meet Octobot, a tiny 'octopus' robot that’s cheap and a real softie
'Octobot' is actually a new kind of a robot which is soft, and not hard. “It’s sort of a hybrid between octopus and robot,” said study author Jennifer Lewis, a Harvard professor of biologically inspired engineering. “We’ve done something that nobody’s been able to do.” Image Source : AP Octobot Soft robotics are important because “you’ve got these hard mechanical objects and soft humans” and when they interact — or collide — it can be a problem, Lewis said. It can’t really even move along a table yet, so this is an “extremely simple first step,” Lewis said. In an email, Tufts University professor Barry Trimmer called it “an ingenious approach to building and controlling a completely soft robot.” Daniela Rus at MIT said the discovery was what the soft robotics community has been looking for: “The octopus robot is a first self-contained soft robot system whose components are all soft — it is a very beautiful machine.”
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