Harvard scientists develop first autonomous soft robot

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/08/25/harvard-scientists-develop-first-autonomous-soft-robot.html?cmpid=NL_SciTech/
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An octobot with fluorescently dyed fugitive inks (red, not auto-evacuated) and hyperelastic actuator layers (blue) fabricated by moulding and EMB3D printing. (Lori Sanders/Harvard University )

Will the next generation of robots be softies?

Meet the octobot, a unique new creation out of Harvard that the university says could be the first step in a new kind of bot.

This totally soft robot has eight movable legs, just like its flesh-and-blood marine cousin, which was the inspiration for the device.

Created partially through 3-D printing, the octobot is autonomous, according to Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Its power source is hydrogen peroxide, which together with a catalyst of platinum, creates gas that travels into the bot’s appendages to move them.

“One long-standing vision for the field of soft robotics has been to create robots that are entirely soft, but the struggle has always been in replacing rigid components like batteries and electronic controls with analogous soft systems and then putting it all together,” Robert Wood, a professor of engineering and one of the lead researchers behind the octobot, said in a statement. “This research demonstrates that we can easily manufacture the key components of a simple, entirely soft robot, which lays the foundation for more complex designs.”

Right now, based on a video released by Harvard, the octobot doesn’t seem to do much: it just moves its arms around. But the next step is to make it do more things, like crawl. In the future, this kind of device could be the first step towards making more soft robots that can control themselves, according to Harvard.

A study about the octobot technology was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Whatever they do....to create something like the Terminator could be decades or centuries away

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This totally soft robot has eight movable legs, just like its flesh-and-blood marine cousin, which was the inspiration for the device.

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Fr*cken why ? Why does it have to look like that ? Who came up with this super octopus idea ?

Yeah i agree but when will they create something like the Terminator....then i would be excited....maybe they should bring in james cameron for a heads up

A square box, would even be better.
It is a machine.. not an amimal.
It is just too weird.

What would a square box do?

Could be a new game in casinos neer you soon.

It is weird, watched the video, the arms are like spastic. The bi-product it would produce would be water and oxygen, maybe that's why they chose an aquatic species as the model. It would leave a puddle of water behind if they actually get it to walk and it would toot oxygen LOL

no limit to what they can come up with,as long as they have taxmoney to burn!

The Gas(Oxygen) would drive the Thing,and the "Waste-Product" would be Water!

Hydrogen Peroxide H2O2.

I stand corrected the decomposition of the Hydrogen peroxide by the introduction of the catalyst platinum would produce two elements, (not bi-products), water and oxygen.

can also be achieved with Potassium-Permanganate,like the Walther-Rocket-engines!
But the heat would probably considerable,and you'd also would have to dispose of the Manganese Oxide!It's messy,while using the Platinum-Catalist is clean.