VideoSoft power: origami muscles give super strength and flexibility to robots
Inspired by the folding technique of origami, US researchers said Monday they have crafted cheap, artificial muscles for robots that give them the power to lift up to 1,000 times their own weight.
The advance offers a leap forward in the field of soft robotics, which is fast replacing an older generation of robots that were jerky and rigid in their movements, researchers say.
“It’s like giving these robots superpowers,” said senior author Daniela Rus, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The muscles, known as actuators, are built on a framework of metal coils or plastic sheets, and each muscle costs around US$1 to make, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.
Now that we have created actuators with properties similar to natural muscle, we can imagine building almost any robot for almost any task
Their origami inspiration derives from a zigzag structure that some of the muscles employ, allowing them to contract and expand as commanded, using vacuum-powered air or water pressure.