Soft Robotics

For most of its history, robotics was a discipline of rigid things. The archetypal robot was the industrial arm: steel and aluminum, precise and powerful, caged off from human workers because its strength made it dangerous. This made sense for the factory floor, where the task was fixed and known and the robot was protected from the unpredictability of the world. But it locked machines out of everywhere else—out of hospitals, homes, coral reefs, and the full texture of human life—because the world is not rigid. Soft robotics is the science of machines built from compliant materials—silicone, flexible plastics, elastic structures—that can bend, deform, and adapt to their environment without anyone computing the response. A soft gripper closing around an irregular object conforms to its shape automatically, the way a human hand does, without a precise model of the object’s geometry. The body does some of the thinking. This is the deepest theme of Daniela Rus’s work on soft robotics: that not