Octopus-Inspired Robot Can Grasp, Crawl, and Swim
To build their squishy aquatic robots, a team of researchers from the BioRobotics Institute at Polo Sant'Anna Valdera in Italy drew inspiration from the octopus. Their OCTOPUS robot is a completely soft robot, which integrates eight arms extending in radial direction and a central body which contains the main processing units. The front arms are mainly used for elongation and grasping, while the others are mainly used for locomotion. The robotic octopus works in water and its buoyancy is close to neutral. The experimental results show that the octopus-inspired robot can walk in water using the same strategy as the animal model, with good performance over different surfaces, including walking through physical constraints. It can grasp objects of different size and shape, thanks to its soft arm materials and conical shape.
Transcript
00:00:01 what if robots could do something like this or this in Leo Italy a team of researchers is taking inspiration for their aquatic robots from an octopus and thanks to some clever biomimicry they're doing it with much less computing power than you might imagine one day flexible electronics and Smart Control mechanisms could let robots Venture off the
00:00:24 assembly line these soft robots could explore a rough terrain and manipulate whatever objects they find [Music] meet octobot or Roop us to build this octopus inspired robot Cecilia lasy and her team copied the animal's unusual physique and method of movement the octopus has no bones and no exoskeleton but its softness doesn't mean that it's
00:00:51 Weak by activating different combinations of muscles the octopus can stiffen specific parts of its arms to apply force it can also elongate or shorten it arms to mimic this ability lasky's team used coils of wire inside some of the octobots arms made from a material called shape memory alloy when current passes through a coil it heats up and
00:01:13 takes a certain predetermined shape sending current through the different combinations of coils allows the robot's arms to bend and flex in all sorts of ways now it was time to make a different kind of arm one that would help the robot crawl lasky's team noticed that the octopus's unique muscular structure allows it to crawl by stretching and
00:01:35 pushing off from the seafloor they mimicked that Locomotion strategy using a simple mechanism each robot arm had two interior cables that stretched and shortened to push the robot along this simple design nonetheless produced a very effective movement their next robot prid drone took on a new challenge swimming but swimming is an even more sophisticated
00:01:59 movement and the robot's floppy arms are really hard to control especially because of the complex dynamics of the water surprisingly lasi found that the winning strategy was to give up most control again lasky's team learned from the real octopus biologists know that when an octopus moves its arm its brain isn't controlling the whole process instead a lot of the control is
00:02:24 delegated to the peripheral nervous system its limbs respond to its environment almost like a reflex based on the physical properties of its body the density of the water the speed of the current and many other ocean variables this concept is called embodied intelligence as lasky's team designed PID drone they created models of how it
00:02:45 would behave based on fluid dynamics buoyancy and dozens of other factors this all meant that the robot barely had to think its arms were built ready to respond to its environment without any additional Computing so by the time they threw the robot into into the water it was already a natural swimmer [Music]