iRobot SquishBot Is Blobalicious
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 19 of October , 2009 at 12:40 am
Back in April, we showed you a conceptual drawing from Boston Robotics for a squishy robot designed to change its shape to squeeze through holes.
The robot in this video is not that robot.
It’s part of the same DARPA ChemBots program, though… This particular SquishBot has been developed by iRobot in cooperation with University of Chicago, and uses a deformation technique called “jamming” to move around. The vid does a better job of explaining exactly how jamming works than I ever could, but the basic idea is that the robot is made up of a bunch of little plastic pockets containing something that could be, but probably isn’t, whatever they fill beanbag chairs with. Normally, the plastic skin of the pockets holds the beanbag stuff together so tightly enough that it forms a solid. When the pockets are inflated with air (that’s what all the hoses are for), the beanbag stuff gets some extra wiggle room, stops binding, and the pockets turn squishy. Combining a bunch of these pockets gets you a robot with a skin that can be made flexible, rigid, or a combination of both. By controlling each pocket, the robot can move itself around and squeeze though holes, under doors, or into ear canals.
This video is actually from sometime last year, according to IEEE:
“The video shows the project as it was about a year ago. The current stage has a bit different design and is moving toward the ability to include sensors or even connect different blobs together, but those details are sketchy.”
Stupid sketchy details. It’s frustrating to know that there’s an evolved version of the SquishBot blobbing around over at iRobot and we can’t see it. Arg. If anybody from iRobot wants to send us a blurry cellphone picture, we’d much appreciate it.
VIA [ IEEE ]
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