Soft Robot

A robot built from soft materials like silicone that can deform substantially, instead of rigid links and joints.

A soft robot is built mainly from soft materials — silicone, elastomers, and the like — so its body can bend and stretch continuously, rather than moving through rigid links connected by joints. Common actuation methods include pneumatics (inflating internal chambers to make a section bend), tendon-driven cables, and artificial muscles such as shape-memory alloys and dielectric elastomers. The advantage is that it's inherently compliant: it's less likely to injure a person or damage a fragile object on contact, and it can conform to irregularly shaped objects. The difficulty is that its degrees of freedom for deformation are essentially unlimited, which makes modeling, simulation, and precise control much harder than with rigid robots. Right now, the most mature real-world use is the soft gripper, used for handling fruit, food, and similar delicate items.

ExampleHarvard's Octobot, released in 2016, was an octopus-shaped robot made entirely of soft materials with no electronic components, powered by gas from an internal chemical reaction.

Also called

Soft Robotics

Related

Soft Gripper · Pneumatic Actuation · Artificial Muscle · Compliance · Deformable-Body Simulation · Bio-inspired Robot

Sources

Wikipedia: Soft robotics