Bots discussed in our series “Robot Archaeology” to date have been rather rigid, hard bodied robots. Another area of research suggests mimicking nature in making robots, the ability to bend, has great promise in doing things wheeled robots have a hard time doing.
Grippers may be made of a number of materials in a process called jamming where granular material becomes hard when compressed. MAKE has an excellent example of this type of gripper in this Instructable and iRobot has their version in this Youtube video.
A flexible surface can also have another material on it to give it different properties when bending or moving. This is good for finger like movements and locomotion.
And using pneumatics, moving air in and out of things, you can make a number of squishy movements that rigid robotics have difficulty replicating. Pneumatics was used to power the movements of the Chuck E Cheese robots. A student team has even taken the flexible surface bot above and made it pneumatic actuated (right). Adafruit has explored a number of soft robotics using pneumatic technology in prior posts.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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