ChIMERA Whole Skin Locomotion Robot
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 8 of February , 2010 at 4:45 am
Participants in DARPA’s ChemBots program are busy producing some pretty cool (and weird) robots. Already, we’ve seen a blob robot from iRobot as well as a creepy looking concept from Boston Dynamics. Video above comes from Virginia Tech’s RoMeLa Lab, and shows their ChIMERA robot, which is an acronym for “Chemically Induced Motion Everting Robotic Amoeba.” Everting is the Word Of The Day, it means “turning inside out.” And that’s just what this robot does: it’s a tube filled with goo that moves forward by continually pulling the outside of its body around and in through the middle of the tube. There are several advantages to this; the entire robot is pliable (allowing it to fit through opening smaller than itself) and it’s also completely sealed with no external moving parts. It can move by placing tension on parts of itself, or by using a system of expanding and contracting plastic rings, or using chemicals (!):
The “do something to something” is probably (this is my best guess, anyway) applying a chemical to the robot that causes the skin to contract. This is some serious outside the box innovation… The chemically induced movement could be powered by a liquid battery, or even perhaps by ambient chemicals in some kind of solution (water? blood? toxic waste? who knows).
The only real issue here is that it’s not entirely clear how a robot like this would interact with its environment. It could push things around and perform passive sensing, but it’s not like you could mount a camera and manipulator arm on one of these… At least, I can’t see how that would work. Still, it’s one of the coolest (and weirdest) robots we’ve seen in a while, and it’s still just a work in progress.
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