MIT’s Andrew Marchese and Daniela Rus put the soft silicone rubber outer skin on their robotic fish. The rubber was cast in a 3D-printed mold.
(Credit: M. Scott Brauer)
Some robot fish we’ve seen wouldn’t be able to escape a predator if their fins depended on it.
Enter the new fish-shaped “soft robot” developed by Andrew Marchese, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. It can execute an escape maneuver called a “C-turn” in about 100 milliseconds, matching the speed of fish in the wild. Such swiftness is one of the things that most sets this robofish apart.
Soft robots are machines that have gushy exteriors and move around through the use of fluids or gases pumping through vein-like internal tubes. They’re of interest because they don’t hurt when they bump into people (nor do they scratch the furniture). “We’re excited about soft robots for a variety of reasons,” Daniela Rus, one of the researchers who designed and built the fish, said in a statement. “As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it’s much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there’s no danger if they whack you.”
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