i
we are developing software robots and there are three important things to know about these
robots
first
there are made out of soft silicone and they can better than what is because
of that
there are also inherently safe to be around
their partners capability band that's what is these are capable compliant motion and there are
also capable of very rapid have john manoeuvres
which is the envelope on what machines can do today and at the robot's ourself
contains and autonomous
in other words
we can it's the power source the computation
i mean i relation and thanking me for these were asked to deliver their emotions
traditionally soft robots have been either self contained
for capable of high performance but not able
so specifically in our lab we want to achieve both of those goals simultaneously in
one machine currently let's talk about has two parts one a little bit smaller is
the rigid part which store all the supporting hardware and the second part a little
bit larger is the soft body where all the continuous natural movement happens
and so we thought about it a fish made sense it has a very similar
structure in the head of the fish where the brains are held it's a little
bit more rigid
but in the rear of the fish where the under that or emotion happens it's
quite soft in compliance
this is are soft robot fish like we said it has a soft body here
in green
and the supporting hardware upfront
in the way this fish works
is its towards fluid onboard in the form of a gas and then release is
gas through a series of pipes and valves into the body
if you think about it is very similar to balloon up a balloon
in that case you're model would be the pressure source in the balloon would be
the body actuator and basically by inflating in on inflating different parts the body we
can get it actually what's special about this fish is that has its brain some
board to
so i from my computer tell the fish to move forward a signal was sent
wirelessly through the water to the brains and in the brains tell the hardware what
to do in order to move forward
biological fish use the escape manoeuvre or the cedar to escape rate
and the do manoeuvres very screen on the order of a hundred millisecond scale robot
fish is also able to execute escape manoeuvre at the same speed on people of
a hundred milliseconds
the fact that our fish can perform an escape manoeuvres really important for the field
of soft robotics
it shows that soft robots can be able to self contained incapable of high performance
the balloon over so fast and it's got such high body curvature that it shows
soft robots might be more capable than heart robots in some tasks