Robotics has come to encompass a lot of different things.
I would basically define it as robotic systems that either the actuators,
the sensors, or the general framing are built out
of unconventional typically compliant material sets.
So using things like rubbers,
using things like liquids,
or even going so far as conductive liquids or fabrics, you name it.
Materials that are not common to what was traditionally used in robotics,
putting that into new constructs and seeing what properties emerge.
So a lot of materials you'd use at home are actually
reasonably common for the projects that you see online.
They're typically sourced from companies that do special effects work,
theatrical work where it's- you can buy your silicone rubbers,
you can buy your urethane rubbers,
and castable plastics, and so forth.
And they're all formulated in ways such that you don't need
an incredible manufacturing facility with a lot of expensive infrastructure.
All you need is the ability to kind of you know mix the different components together,
form into molds and start building things by hand.
It's a remarkably enabling way of prototyping.
I think that's why well,
that's certainly why we did it that way back in university.
And a lot of people will see online coming up with
crazy gadgets and art installations using those sorts of materials and methods.
A lot of our design is focused around
driving the sorts of mechanical properties
that you would need to survive real industrial environments.
So we take a bit of a different vector,
but you can definitely build soft robots and
people have built out of any of a number of things.
So straws, yes.
Back at Harvard there is the straw bot which is a drinking straw
with a cut in it and has an elastomeric balloon on
the inside so that when you inflate you can just get a little bendable hinge.
That's a soft robot.
Water bottles, there have been people who have used
recycled water bottles as preforms for
blow molding to blow mold them into new kinds of actuators.
So you can use all those sorts of materials.
The sort of materials that they use in an academic setting,
the sort of castable tabletop stuff,
they typically have lower quality mechanical properties.
I can't get terribly into the specifics of what we use.
A big part of the feel of soft robotics is understanding your material science,
and so a large portion of what we've achieved here at the company is
understanding how composites of lots of different kinds of materials,
know how they can come together in
a specific pattern delivers you know amazing abilities.
So that's that's the magic piece of this or at least one part of that is of it.
But yeah, when you transition from the stuff that you make on the lab bench in
an academic setting with hobbyist stuff to some of
the best materials in the world sometimes materials that you've formulated yourself,
you start to really drive performance and start getting the sort
of abilities allow you to run for millions of cycles in an industrial environment.
So a lot of people ask whether or not pneumatics like what we use
here at soft robotics is the only way to drive a soft robot, and it isn't.
We choose pneumatics because it has very interesting properties that we like to drive on.
But you can also do hydraulic soft robots,
you can do electrically actuated soft robots where
you use dielectric elastomer actuators.
You can also do heat driven soft robots using shape memory alloy coils.
There's a lot of chemically actuated soft robots that people have explored,
that make a lot of sense for certain kinds of medical applications.
So there's a lot of different ways of creating soft robotic actuation.
We use pneumatics because it makes a lot of
sense for the customer needs we're trying to satisfy.
So for one, industrial environments already have house air.
Pneumatic systems are an incredibly common way to
power devices in factories, in packaging facilities,
and so as a result,
our technology becomes a lot more accessible to you if
we also drive our technology using pneumatics.
You just plug and play.
Everything we do here, we try to make it plug and play.
So that's one of the ways we can accomplish it.
The other aspect of pheumatics that's very
interesting is the fact that air is very very compressible.
So we talked earlier about the fact that passive dynamics is a big part
of why our actuators are able to get such complicated grips without any computation.
Well, why not add another aspect of compliance in the air that you use?
So using air then allows us to get more adaptive grips,
which is a very powerful thing.
And then on top of it,
it also makes our systems very, very safe.
So the whole idea of being able to collide with a soft robot and
not have it harm you in part has to do with the fact that these are inflated structures.
So if I bump into an inflated structure,
it simply just dissipates that by compressing
the air and maybe shoveling it to somewhere else in the elastomer construct.
So you can create these wonderful robotic systems that can
work alongside people without creating any sort of damage,
and it also provides the sort of delicacy you need for some of the,
for example, food items that we handle which tend to be very,
very fragile, very easily deformable.