Robotic arms at various stages of activation
Wei et al
Origami-inspired robotic arms made from cotton plants and pigs biodegradation when they no longer need them. Such soft robots can be further developed to perform medical procedures within the body before passing safely.
Soft robotics is a growing field. This is because there are many applications where hard, rigid devices are unsafe or unwelcome, such as people in or even within the very close spaces of the machine.
Most experimental soft robots are made from synthetic materials such as silicone rubber. now, Hankin Jean Westlake University in Z Jiang Province, China and his colleagues created a simple version of cellulose, derived from cotton and gelatin. It is controlled by a computer and also functions as the controller itself.
To make it, researchers create cresting origami shapes, compressed and bent tubes left and right, and combined four of these modules to create a 240mm basic robotic arm I’ve created it. By tightening and loosening the three equally spaced threads running within this arm, it was possible to operate them in any direction using an external motor.
Gelatin also acts as a sensor, changing the electrical resistance under bending. By recording these resistance values, scientists were able to determine exactly where the arm was at any time. They even demonstrated that by passing the varying resistance values ​​to a small computer, the small structure of the module can be used as a joystick for inputting signals in a similar way. These signals can be used to control another soft robot arm.
“In the future, there may be more robots on the planet than humans, so there will be a lot of waste,” Jiang says. “In landfills, these robots need to disappear,” said Jiang, the current materials of the robots are harmlessly degraded in the environment, but slightly different to completely decompose within the human body. I say it’s necessary.
Kaspar Althoefer At Queen Mary University in London, soft robots can be useful for a variety of applications, such as narrowing down to small spaces in industrial processes, safely interacting with people, and safely interacting with medical procedures. Especially surgery. “In a scenario like this, you can leave the tools, as it is, without any problems,” says Althoefer. “Soft robotics strongly believes we can go far beyond where we are. It’s still a fairly new area.”
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