Science Focus
original post »Today's issue of Science describes a new robot that has so many cool features it was hard to cram them all into the headline. It's made with a 3D printer, which is used to create gradients between flexible and hard material. It carries its own fuel, enough for dozens of hops to new locations. And it moves by pointing itself in the right direction, then setting off a butane explosion underneath itself.
Flexible or soft-bodied robots are inspired in part by biology, where squishy creatures regularly outperform our most carefully engineered robots. Why is that? The authors of the new paper have a simple explanation: "One of the reasons biological systems often outperform engineered systems is that in nature, which employs self-organization for fabrication, added structural complexity comes at a minimal cost."
But, they argue, 3D printing has the potential to change that calculus. With the right printer, it's possible to create hardware that mixes several materials, each with distinctive properties. And those distinctive properties turned out to be needed for the design they were working on.
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