Researchers use combustible gases to power leaping machines
They can already stand, walk, wriggle under obstacles, and
change colors. Now researchers are adding a new skill to the soft robot
arsenal: jumping.
Using small explosions produced by a mix of methane and
oxygen, researchers at Harvard have designed a soft robot that can leap as much
as a foot in the air. That ability to jump could one day prove critical in
allowing the robots to avoid obstacles during search and rescue operations. The
research is described in a Feb. 6 paper in the international edition of
Angewandte Chemie.
“Initially, our soft robot systems used pneumatic pressure
to actuate,” said Robert Shepherd, first author of the paper, former
postdoctoral researcher in the Whitesides Research Group at Harvard, and now an
assistant professor at Cornell. “While that system worked, it was rather slow —
it took on the order of a second. Using combustion, however, allows us to
actuate the robots very fast. We were able to measure the speed of the robot’s
jump at 4 meters per second.”