MAKING TROUBLE

Soft Robots

By Saul Griffith

Omnivorous Inventor

Arwen Griffith

Traditional robotics is doing brilliantly right now. To try and beat these guys at their game is a losing proposition, especially for people who don’t have an extensive background in robotics. There are, however, wide-open fields in robotics.

The promise of the “soft” robotics work we’ve done to date is great. These robots are soft, compliant, and human-compatible. For wearable applications — prosthetics and exoskeletal (exodermis?) suits — and for human-safe “co-robotics” they have great applications. I’m just geeking out on the interesting design problems in this space.

I’m lucky enough to be working with a fabulous team. Peter Lynn brings just the right odd mix of background, including “soft” kite design, mechanical engineering, and thermodynamics, which helps us design in this strange new world of soft machines. The world’s first “chief seamster” is Della Shea, who builds our prototypes and wrangles ungodly bundles of PVC-coated nylon fabric into shape. We recently were lucky enough to convince Kevin Albert to come on board and teach us how to control these machines, an extremely important part of the process. He comes from experience helping the (in-) famous robot Big Dog learn to walk. Martin Wicke, Geoffrey Irving, Keith Pasko, and Ryan Alexander are helping us write the software tools to design and analyze these things.

We’re still in the R&D stage of things; we’ve built a very slow, lumbering, air-powered robot, but the more sophisticated iterations are literally just arms strapped to a board. They’re a glimpse of things to come.

Saul Griffith is chief troublemaker at otherlab.com.