Making ‘soft’ robots work harder | Science / Technology - UC Riverside

Holly Ober, Senior Public Information Officer at University of California, Riverside reports, A new robot developed at UC Riverside can navigate uneven surfaces with silicone legs.

SoRX, a novel soft-legged robot that can cross terrains consisting of sand and rocks.
Photo: ARCS Lab at UCR

Some fear robots might one day take over the world. But before they do that, machines will first have to learn how to walk over uneven surfaces.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, are trying to make robots more adaptive and safer for humans to interact with by developing soft robotic legs that respond to surfaces more naturally. 

By adding this layer of “mechanical intelligence” onto the artificial decision-making algorithms that animate most robots, the researchers are building robots that are better able to navigate different environments, perform delicate tasks, or eventually be worn by people for therapeutic purposes.

Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering doctoral student Zhichao Liu and Konstantinos Karydis, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, built a new purely soft-legged robot that can walk smoothly over uneven surfaces without metal springs or cables or requiring any computations to negotiate changes in terrain texture and elevation. They will present their work at the 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE’s flagship robotics conference.
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Source: UC Riverside