Meet the soft, cuddly robots of the future

Rigid robots step aside — a new generation of squishy, stretchy machines is wiggling our way.

 n 2007, Cecilia Laschi asked her father to catch a live octopus for her seaside lab in Livorno, Italy. He thought she was crazy: as a recreational fisherman, he considered the octopus so easy to catch that it must be a very stupid animal. And what did a robotics researcher who worked with metal and microprocessors want with a squishy cephalopod anyway?

Nevertheless, the elder Laschi caught an octopus off the Tuscan coast and gave it to his daughter, who works for the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. She and her students placed the creature in a saltwater tank where they could study how it grasped titbits of anchovy and crab. The team then set about building robots that could mimic those motions.

Prototype by prototype, they created an artificial tentacle with internal springs and wires that mirrored an octopus's muscles, until the device could undulate, elongate, shrink, stiffen and curl in a lifelike manner¹. “It's a completely different way of building robots,” says Laschi.

This approach has become a major research front for robotics in the past ten years. Scientists and engineers in the field have long worked on hard-bodied robots, often inspired by humans and other animals with hard skeletons. These machines have the virtue of moving in mathematically predictable ways, with rigid limbs that can bend and straighten only around fixed joints. But they also require meticulous programming and extensive feedback to avoid smacking into things; even then, their motions often become erratic or even dangerous when dealing with humans, new objects, bumpy terrain or other unpredictable situations.

Robots inspired by flexible creatures such as octopuses, caterpillars or fish offer a solution. Instead of requiring intensive (and often imperfect) computations, soft robots built of mostly pliable or elastic materials can just mould themselves to their surroundings. Although some of these machines use wires or springs to mimic muscles and tendons, as a group, soft robots have ditched the skeletons that defined previous robot generations. With nothing resembling bones or joints, these machines can stretch, twist, scrunch and squish in completely new ways. They can transform in shape or size, wrap around objects and even touch people more safely than ever before.

Building these machines involves developing new technologies to animate floppy materials with purposeful movement, and methods for monitoring and predicting their actions. But if this succeeds, such robots might be used as rescue workers that can squeeze into tight spaces or slink across shifting debris; as home health aides that can interact closely with humans; and as industrial machines that can grasp new objects without previous programming.

Researchers have already produced a wide variety of such machines, including crawling robotic caterpillars², swimming fish-bots³ and undulating artificial jellyfish⁴. On 29–30 April, ten teams will compete in Livorno in an international soft-robotics challenge — the first of its kind. Laschi, who serves as scientific coordinator for the European Commission-backed sponsoring research consortium, RoboSoft, hopes that the event will drive innovation in the field.

“If you look in biology, and you ask what Darwinian evolution has coughed up, there are all kinds of incredible solutions to movement, sensing, gripping, feeding, hunting, swimming, walking and gliding that have not been open to hard robots,” says chemist George Whitesides, a soft-robotics researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The idea of building fundamentally new classes of machines is just very interesting.”

Read the Nature News Feature

10 terrifying uses of artificial intelligence

Many advances in artificial intelligence are innovative and extraordinary, but some are downright creepy. Here are 10 of the eeriest ways people are using, or could use, AI.

1. Robots predicting the future
2. Robot soldiers
3. Schizophrenic robot
4. Economic meltdown
5. Robots that deceive
6. Robot lovers
7. Survival robots
8. Police using AI algorithms to predict crimes
9. AI-based medical treatment
10. Autonomous drones and weapons

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The Robots Are Coming

How Technological Breakthroughs Will Transform Everyday Life

Robots have the potential to greatly improve the quality of our lives at home, at work, and at play. Customized robots working alongside people will create new jobs, improve the quality of existing jobs, and give people more time to focus on what they find interesting, important, and exciting. Commuting to work in driverless cars will allow people to read, reply to e-mails, watch videos, and even nap. After dropping off one passenger, a driverless car will pick up its next rider, coordinating with the other self-driving cars in a system designed to minimize traffic and wait times—and all the while driving more safely and efficiently than humans.

Yet the objective of robotics is not to replace humans by mechanizing and automating tasks; it is to find ways for machines to assist and collaborate with humans more effectively. Robots are better than humans at crunching numbers, lifting heavy objects, and, in certain contexts, moving with precision. Humans are better than robots at abstraction, generalization, and creative thinking, thanks to their ability to reason, draw from prior experience, and imagine. By working together, robots and humans can augment and complement each other’s skills.

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Mind Reading Robots by 2020

On April 22nd 2010, the U.S. press was fussing over the Tea Party, illegal aliens (not the outer space kind), and Earth Day.

But in Japan, a short cryptic statement in the Nikkei, Japan's largest business newspaper, made a startling announcement about a somewhat different vision of the future -- a goal to make available commercial mind-reading devices and personal assistant bots within the next 10 years.

It's not surprising that the Japanese government and private sector would collaborate on a new initiative to develop bots with AI capable of detecting when you're hungry, cold, or in need of assistance, and electronics that can be controlled by thought alone.

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