Most things that “look good on paper” still have to be tested and proven, but that’s not true of the origami robots that have been developed at Boston University (BU).
Working out of the BU Photonics Center and funded by the Arlington, Virginia-based U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Professor Xin Chen, a chemist, and his team have created robots molded from paper and silicone rubber that, he says, “can go a lot of places where hard robots cannot go.”
Still image from a video shows inflation of origami robot.
According to a report in Wired Science, the “soft bots” are powered by nothing more than puffs of air. They contain no electronics and do not run on electricity, yet they can bend, twist, grip and even lift more than 100 times their weight. According to Chen, “If you want to go through a winding tube or rubble, or some other tough environment that’s difficult to reach, you need to be flexible.”
The pneumatic prototypes aren’t as sophisticated as R2-D2 of Star Wars fame or even as the metallic robotics used for manufacturing purposes that can build cars, carry heavy equipment, and even defuse bombs. In the future, the researchers hope to add wiring and electronics to bring even more functions to their forms.
However, the flexibility of the soft bots has inspired engineers to look at nature for ideas and develop models that resemble insects, birds, snakes, fish and even dogs. The George M. Whitesides Research Group in the Harvard University Department of Chemistry already has developed air-powered rubber robots that can constrict like snakes and undulate under obstacles.
The new work at Boston University takes the soft robots a step further by incorporating paper, fabric, and wire mesh to add strength and definition to silicone-molded shapes. After they are molded, the devices are hooked up to a simple compressed air source, such as a syringe.
Getting the soft robots to perform a particular action is a feat of origami. Folded in just the right way and glued in the right spots, for example, the researchers demonstrated how a scrunched up piece of silicone-soaked paper lifted a two-pound weight. The puff of air required to drive it was equivalent to roughly twice that of a human exhalation.
The team also has made cylinders that inflate into spheres, tubes that act like springs and compact stacks that turn into rigid rings or pipes.
The military is interested in such robots as weapons or spying devices, but beyond battlefield applications, the researchers also envision shrinking their creations. “In principle, you could scale down to microscopic or nanoscopic [dimensions],” Chen said. “You can’t do the same with hard materials.”
For more information, see the video: GMWGroupHarvard/YouTube (News - Alert); or the recently published article,: “Elastomeric Origami: Programmable Paper-Elastomer Composites as Pneumatic Actuators,” by R. V. Martinez, C. R. Fish, X. Chen, and G. M. Whitesides, Advanced Functional Materials,Feb. 9, 2012.
Cheryl Kaften is an accomplished communicator who has written for consumer and corporate audiences. She has worked extensively for MasterCard (News - Alert) Worldwide, Philip Morris USA (Altria), and KPMG, and has consulted for Estee Lauder and the Philadelphia Inquirer Newspapers. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by
Rich Steeves
