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A soft robot has no problem moving with no motor and no gears

A soft robot has no problem moving with no motor and no gears

hhs

Comments (22)

  • simojo
    Liquid crystal elastomers will most likely never be used in humans because, in order to drive the phase transition (mematic mesogens going from isotopic to anisotropic phase) necessary for macro scale work, the LCE has to be heated well beyond 100C. Even in non-thermal contexts, you need kilovolts to influence a doped bulk LCE. I just don't see it happening.
  • msuniverse2026
    Why do these kept getting made? I feel like I see some new soft robot every few months or so. Are they used to infiltrate past grates in a sewer security system and slide under lasers or something what is up with these???
  • world2vec
    There's this YouTube channel called "soiboi soft"[0] that is doing many experiments with air-powered soft robotics and microfluidics.It's a pretty cool concept and might have interesting albeit niche applications.[0] https://www.youtube.com/@soiboisoft
  • calmbonsai
    These phase transition motive architectures all suffer from the same issues of not enough precision with repeatable positioning, very low speed, and limited control over the shaping of force/torque curve.The only practical example are wax motors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motorThis entire article is simply bad university lab PR.
  • smusamashah
  • jzemeocala
    one step closer to Rudy Rucker's "piezoplastic" from his Ware series
  • grimm1002
    [dead]