Researchers have developed the first quadriped soft robot capable of standing up and walking by itself without being tethered towires.

The team from Harvard's School for Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said the untethered soft robot also constantly connects to computers and a power source.

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The team enlarged their earlier soft robot designs, allowing an individual robot to carry on its back the hardware it requires to successfully operate. This hardware includes as batteries, control systems and micro-compressors.

"Earlier versions of soft robots were all tethered, which works fine in some applications, but what we wanted to do was challenge people's concept of what a robot has to look like," said Tolley, the study's first author.

He added that other robotics engineers settled on using rigid materials such as metal to build the moving computers as these were easier to model and control.

"This work is very inspired by nature, and we wanted to demonstrate that soft materials can also be the basis for robots," Tolley said.

In comparison to earlier soft robot designs, which were generally smaller than a steno pad, the new system designed by the team is massive, measuring over half-a-meter in length, and is able to carry loads as heavy as 7.5 pounds on its back.

However, the design process requires more ingenuity than just scaling up the small designs.

Tolley said if one starts to think about putting the essential hardware (such as those on the back of the 50 centimeter robot) on a robot with no tether, the engineer should also consider making a design capable of carrying the parts.

Something able to handle more difficulties is required, and material, design and control challenges should be overcome, he said.

Providing the untethered robot the strength it needs to bear the core components meant giving it 16 pounds per square inch of air pressure, over twice the seven psi utilized by the earlier models.

The team needed tougher materials to deal with the heightened pressure.

The team settled on a "composite" of silicon rubber made from rigid rubber embedded with hollow microspheres of glass for weight reduction. Kevlar fabric was used to make the robot's bottom half to ensure it was lightweight but tough enough at the same time.

Tolley said the process resulted in a robot able resist extreme conditions.

The team tested the robot in snow; walked it through flames; submerged it in water and even ran over it with a car.

After each trial, the robot emerged unscathed.

TagsRobotics, soft robots, Harvard, Engineering, Computers, Research, Bioinspiration and Biomimetics