3D-Printed Pneumatic Quadruped Robot Adapts to Rough Terrain

At IROS in Chicago a few years back, then Harvard grad student Michael Tolley introduced us to a robot that used explosions to jump. It was soft, it was pink, it had three wiggly legs that it used to position itself, and it was kinda freaky looking. As it turns out, Tolley now has his own robotics lab at UC San Diego, and they've been working on ways of efficiently fabricating useful soft robots. Their latest paper, which will be presented at ICRA in Singapore next week, throws a fourth wiggly leg into the mix to make a soft quadruped robot that can walk. Soft robots (with soft actuators) have the potential to be easy and cheap to construct in lots of very different, very adaptable, and intrinsically safe configurations.