Meet the Soft, Cuddly Robots of the Future (nature.com) 22
turkeydance writes with a link to an article at Nature exploring the squishier side of robots research. Rather than conventional (and rigid) materials and architectures for robots, soft robot researchers are building bots that employ materials that fluidly bend, stretch, roll, and squeeze, more along the lines of an octopus than an industrial claw; some of the ones featured in the article (and shown in an accompanying video) are explicitly based on octopus movement. "Think about how hard it is to tie shoelaces," says Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "That's the kind of capability we'd like to have in robotics."
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I certainly hope so (Score:3)
I sure hope that robots are nice and soft and cuddly and squeezable. I wouldn't want to bruise or injure myself while using them.
Impressive tech (Score:3)
I saw a robot like this a few years ago in Japan. It was humanoid, child size. It was shaking hands with children and they seemed very relaxed with it.
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Just say it (Score:2)
They want an animated Real Doll, preferably something that maintains a human body temperature.
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You want one that looks, feels, and moves like a human? Yours for less than a million dollars. (maybe)
We should be in production by 2028 at the latest.. (maybe)
To Serve Man (Score:2)
I just want the robots to be soft and squishy and look exactly like Isabel Lucas.
https://obxe.files.wordpress.c... [wordpress.com]
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Share and enjoy! (Score:1)
Tying shoelaces requires more than squishy fingers (Score:2)
We are nowhere near making a robotic manipulator with even half the abilities of the human hand. Not only can it be moved in a fairly astounding range, but its sensor capabilities are phenomenal. When I am soldering or doing automotive repair, each hand often does two or three different things at once! e.g. hold this, twist that, pull on this other thing, hold that out of the way, sense which way this thing is pointed, feel out the place where the part goes... Lots of people are making soft robots, but nobo
Exploring the Ware Tetralogy.. (Score:3)
Sounds like Rucker's quad book series: Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware maybe making the light of day.
Beware the moldies and ridicule the cheeseballers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]