What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a robot? Well yes, you're not wrong, however, I want to introduce a new breed of robots that might change the way you think about them entirely. 'Soft robots', unlike their old, rigid counterparts, are simply robots constructed with soft materials. These transformations have emerged due to recent new fields of science such as biomimetics (looking to nature to solve complex human problems) and morphological computation (replicating physical systems to improve computation efficiency). In other words, systems that basically mimic nature and biology to make things work more efficiently.

A soft robotic sleeve placed around the heart in a pig model of acute heart failure. The actuators embedded in the sleeve support heart function by mimicking the outer heart muscles that induce the heart to beat. An international team of scientists has developed a soft robotic sleeve that can be implanted on the external surface of the heart to restore blood circulation in pigs (and possibly humans in the future) whose hearts have stopped beating. The device is a silicon-based system with two layers of actuators: one that squeezes circumferentially and one that squeezes diagonally, both designed to mimic the movement of healthy hearts when they beat. Heart failure affects 41 million people worldwide.