Heavy Robots Essay

1014 Words5 Pages

SQUISHY ROBOTS

Robotic science all over the world is advancing with astounding speed. Efforts have been directed towards emulating biological systems, called bio-inspired robotics, to the best possible extent. Now, try to picture the most advanced robot that you’ve seen or read about. It must be brilliantly programmed to make complex movement, execute difficult algorithms etc. but they are all of a fixed shape; they are rigid, hard and non-deformable. In the future, we expect robots to do many tasks for our sake i.e. automation is sought after. But the current progress of robotics is not enough to achieve it. As mentioned earlier, rigidity and inflexibility is a major drawback. Till now it was so as alloys used as components were inflexible, and flexible materials could not be used in robotics. But now we have a new material that is both, rigid and flexible!

A professor in the Mechanical Engineering department of MIT, Anette Hosoi along with her associates have developed a new material for achieving highly deformable, flexible, rigid, hard, soft structures—according to our need. With the application of heat to this material, it “softens” and is easily moldable to a different shape, even with a little application of pressure. When allowed to cool back down, it regains its original shape and becomes “hard” again.
The material that they have …show more content…

Foam is used because when squeezed, it can be reduced to a small fraction of the space of its normal size and bounces back to it on removal of pressure. Wax, when heated to a particular, moderate low temperature, changes the hard substance to a soft-pliable one. Foam is dipped into heated wax and it is allowed to get absorbed fully before being removed. On cooling, it solidifies into a mesh like cubical lattice with multiple “nodes and edges”. These unit structures can be treated as individual units while applying deformations, hence increasing the level of achievable

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