Autonomous Robots: Stiff but Agile - Advanced Science News

Robots perform delicate surgeries, are sent to explore and analyze Martian soil, or accompany elderly patients in their everyday life in the form of friendly baby seal pets. Advances in design and automation of robotic machines have been achieved by understanding and mimicking how living systems evolve, sense, and adapt to their environment. Yet, the range of motions, velocities, and functions of today's robots are still very far from those observed in the living animals such as cephalopods, squeezing through narrow bottlenecks in a few seconds, or even mollusks, able to grind and chew rocks. The quest, however, is not to boldly recreate synthetically living systems but to build machines with a similar level of capabilities in response to specific technological needs. Biotechnology, security or exploration may indeed require autonomous machines with not only well-defined movement accuracy, conformability, actuation speed, but also other characteristics including temperature resistance, mechanical resilience, and optical transparency which may not be found in nature.