Unlocking soft robotics control with AI’s cousin: Reservoir computing
Soft robotics—machines made of flexible, muscle-like materials—can bend and stretch in fluid ways that put the rigid robots of old sci-fi movies to shame. But the flexibility that lets them pick ripe tomatoes or navigate a search-and-rescue site comes at a cost: Soft robotics are notoriously difficult to control.
Robots are finally getting a grip. Developers have been striving to close the gap on robotic gripping for the past several years, pursuing applications for multibillion-dollar industries. Securely gripping and transferring fast-moving items on conveyor belts holds vast promise for businesses. Soft Robotics, a Bedford, Mass., startup, is harnessing NVIDIA…
Robotics researchers, engineers and materials scientists showed it is possible to make programmable, nonelectronic circuits that control the actions of soft robots by processing information encoded in bursts of compressed air.
Researchers have developed an automatic process for making soft sensors. These universal measurement cells can be attached to almost any kind of object. Applications are envisioned especially in robotics and prosthetics.