Why do these kept getting made? I feel like I see some new soft robot every few months or so. Are they used to infiltrate past grates in a sewer security system and slide under lasers or something what is up with these???
> With their ability to shapeshift and manipulate delicate objects, soft robots could work as medical implants, deliver drugs inside the body and help explore dangerous environments.
I'm not sure that's a big strike against it yet. Kinda the whole point of engineering in academia is to work on hard things that are far from commercialization.
The fact that a product has not yet been created from a given technology does not mean the technology or the research itself is useless, or will not turn out to be useful in the long term. You can also learn a lot from research or development that does not ultimately work out.
>>"never once seen a productionalized version of these"
YET
Just because we have not YET seen one does not mean it should not be pursued.
Examples are endless, start with: 30 years ago, no one had seen a solar panel with 25% efficiency produced for less than $1/watt. Now, it is the most economical and fastest-growing and most sustainable energy source on the planet.
That argument is simply an argument against all efforts at making progress. Perhaps rethink making it?
You can't mix really strong robots with humans without barriers separating them. That's one reason humanoid robots won't sell. They're dangerous. Real robots in real factories that make real stuff can juggle car engines. And they can tear you limb from limb. So they work behind barriers and intrusion detection systems.
This is the much more likely future of home robotics. Yes it will be a box, because it would be dangerous to let you stick your fingers inside that mechanism. It won't walk around.
Disaster response is a lie researchers tell themselves when building military hardware. The purpose of such robots would be to e.g. burrow into the collapsed tunnels at Fordow and confirm the uranium is there. (Or, alternatively, burrow into military tunnels to identify targets.)
Liquid crystal elastomers will most likely never be used in humans because, in order to drive the phase transition (mematic mesogens going from isotopic to anisotropic phase) necessary for macro scale work, the LCE has to be heated well beyond 100C. Even in non-thermal contexts, you need kilovolts to influence a doped bulk LCE. I just don't see it happening.
These phase transition motive architectures all suffer from the same issues of not enough precision with repeatable positioning, very low speed, and limited control over the shaping of force/torque curve.
I don’t know much at all about materials - but wouldn’t this be a little “fuzzy”? If they’re using heat to expand/contract whatever material, I imagine there’s a degree of variance with the starting state / ending state - depending on the environment the “soft robot” is in.
A static amount of electricity may only be able to move the wings so much in a cold environment, right?
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Yes, sometimes that's all it takes.
> A broad variety of serpentine and continuum robots have been developed for minimally invasive surgical applications.
Soft robotic grippers are also interesting because they allow you to grasp objects without complex touch/force sensors.
https://joaobuzzatto.com/kirigami-grippers/
> With their ability to shapeshift and manipulate delicate objects, soft robots could work as medical implants, deliver drugs inside the body and help explore dangerous environments.
>>"never once seen a productionalized version of these"
YET
Just because we have not YET seen one does not mean it should not be pursued.
Examples are endless, start with: 30 years ago, no one had seen a solar panel with 25% efficiency produced for less than $1/watt. Now, it is the most economical and fastest-growing and most sustainable energy source on the planet.
That argument is simply an argument against all efforts at making progress. Perhaps rethink making it?
We do have subsystems that might qualify though (neck, spine, tongue, nether bits).
Hence soft robots. They're safe. Also useless.
> Also useless
Grow some imagination
It's a pretty cool concept and might have interesting albeit niche applications.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@soiboisoft
The only practical example are wax motors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motor
This entire article is simply bad university lab PR.
A static amount of electricity may only be able to move the wings so much in a cold environment, right?