The latest one, created by scientists at Harvard University, uses artificial scaly skins to move forward — kind of like a snake.
But what’s special about it is its skin — a thin, stretchable plastic sheet that’s been cut with a laser.
The cuts, in the shape of triangles or circles, resemble the scales on the skin of snakes.
When air is pumped into the tube, the robot expands and contracts, allowing the scales to pop up, anchor against the surface, and pull the robot forward.
In a study published today in Science Robotics, scientists showed that the artificial snakeskins work against rough surfaces like asphalt and concrete.
To mimic the snakeskin, Ahmad Rafsanjani, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, resorted to the Japanese art of paper cutting, called kirigami.
The scaly skin is easy to make, and it saves engineers the pain of making actuators to enable movement. »
