Soft robotics is a program that we've been working on in the lab for a little
bit over a year now and what we've done is to basically
looks to nature for inspiration specifically organisms
octopi and squid, soft organisms with the idea that these robots would have
advantages in terms of manipulation, maneuverability, fabrications, cost, over
the traditional heart robots that most people are familiar with one of the
remarkable things that they can do is they can actually change their
color and appearance and they do this to
signal one another, to blend in with their environment. We again drew on the
these organisms as inspiration and decided
that it was actually a pretty
logical evolution to try and include some of these aspects and our robots. We
think that they could be very useful for surgeons. We're also interested in the
idea that we can use to display aspect of our work by being able to change
colors to be bright or even to glow in the dark that could actually guy our rescue
workers to a specific location, like a survivor or something along those lines.
