Soft autonomous robot that can crawl. It’s obviously inspired from earthworms and is made almost entirely of soft materials.
Meshworm, the latest creation from researchers at MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University is a soft autonomous robot that can crawl. It’s obviously inspired from earthworms and is made almost entirely of soft materials, “artificial muscle” composed of a flexible mesh tube segmented by loops of nickel / titanium wire. The wire contracts and squeezes the tube when heated by a flowing current, but cut the power and it returns to its original shape, creating propulsion in a similar way to its living kin. Taking traditional moving parts out of the equation also makes it pretty hardy, as proven by extensive testing.
DARPA is known for getting its fingers in all sorts of strange pies, and it also supported this project. We can’t see it being the fastest way of gathering intel, but the potential medical applications, such as next-gen endoscopes, sound plausible enough.
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