For robotic inspiration, Daniel Preston, assistant professor of mechanical engineering (MECH) at Rice, looks to such creatures as worms, octopi and jellyfish.
Unlike humans and other animals with solid bodies, such organisms, Preston and his co-authors write, “accomplish complex feats of movement and locomotion using entirely soft body structures.”
Preston and two other researchers at Rice contributed a “Focus” article to Science Robotics, part of the Science family of journals. “Focus” articles introduce a field and highlight a research article in the same issue.
Preston’s “Pneumatic soft robots take a step toward autonomy ” appeared in the Feb. 17 issue.
That issue’s cover story is “Electronics-free pneumatic circuits for controlling soft-legged robots,” by Dylan Drotman, a doctoral student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues.
“Ours is not an original research article but rather a brief perspective piece. We review the literature and offer some of our thoughts on the outlook and future directions in the field,” said Preston, director of the Preston Innovation Lab at Rice.
His co-authors in the MECH department are Anoop Rajappan, a Rice Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, and Barclay Jumet, a first-year doctoral student supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
For more than 20 years, researchers in robotics have studied soft-bodied creatures, hoping to mimic their motions. The work has “come to fruition in recent years,” the authors report in the review article.
Among the challenges researchers continue to face are “fabricating viable sensors, actuators, control circuits, and power supplies from soft materials and unifying these components into a self-contained, responsive system.”
After reviewing the work of Drotman and others, Preston’s article concludes: “Ultimately, while roboticists have covered impressive ground in recent times, soft robots with pneumatic brains have several exciting miles left to tread on the road to full autonomy.”