Built around a silicon outer shell, the robotic fish is controlled using two tightly woven channels that snake through the robot’s flexible body. To actuate the bot’s tail a small container of compressed CO2 evacuates gas into the channels, forcing the fish’s silicon tail to whip back and forth with the speed and fluidity of its biological mirror.
According to Daniela Rus, an MIT CSAIL professor, “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.”
What’s more, unlike traditional robots with hard exoskeletons, soft robots have a much wider range of motion given the fact that they can run into things without destroying them. With this flexibility, soft robots can also begin to replicate natural motions.
As soft robotics and machine control produce more sophisticated robots, especially those that interact with humans, they may also garner the ability to gesture and move more naturally. With natural movement, robots of the future might be able to communicate more effectively with their human counterparts, perhaps one day becoming indistinguishable for their biological coworkers.
While any such scenario is decades away, it’s interesting to think that robotic evolution might vaguely mirror that of our own – rising from a morphology designed for the sea into a soft-tissued, upright thinking machine.
Image and Video Courtesy of MIT