A soft robot has no problem moving with no motor and no gears | Hacker News Reader

A soft robot has no problem moving with no motor and no gears

engineering.princeton.edu

87 pointshhs28 comments

Why do these kept getting made? I feel like I see some new soft robot every few months or so. Are they used to infiltrate past grates in a sewer security system and slide under lasers or something what is up with these???

Literally the first line of the article:

> With their ability to shapeshift and manipulate delicate objects, soft robots could work as medical implants, deliver drugs inside the body and help explore dangerous environments.

I think to OPs point, we keep hearing that same line and I've never once seen a productionalized version of these

I'm not sure that's a big strike against it yet. Kinda the whole point of engineering in academia is to work on hard things that are far from commercialization.

The fact that a product has not yet been created from a given technology does not mean the technology or the research itself is useless, or will not turn out to be useful in the long term. You can also learn a lot from research or development that does not ultimately work out.

>>"never once seen a productionalized version of these"

YET

Just because we have not YET seen one does not mean it should not be pursued.

Examples are endless, start with: 30 years ago, no one had seen a solar panel with 25% efficiency produced for less than $1/watt. Now, it is the most economical and fastest-growing and most sustainable energy source on the planet.

That argument is simply an argument against all efforts at making progress. Perhaps rethink making it?

https://www.bu.edu/biorobotics/icra10workshop/icra10workshop...

> A broad variety of serpentine and continuum robots have been developed for minimally invasive surgical applications.

Soft robotic grippers are also interesting because they allow you to grasp objects without complex touch/force sensors.

https://joaobuzzatto.com/kirigami-grippers/

Because it's a really cool concept that a lot of engineers and researchers are excited about, despite the lack of practical applications.

Yes, sometimes that's all it takes.

and the the Dept of War can imagine creative enough uses for these things to keep funding them (it's how we got computers and the internet too)

We are soft robots (mostly flesh). The skeleton is a scaffold on which our muscles hang. It makes sense to try to replicate what works in biology.

Squishy actuators, to manipulate the rigid links of a skeleton, does not make a soft robot.

We do have subsystems that might qualify though (neck, spine, tongue, nether bits).

You can't mix really strong robots with humans without barriers separating them. That's one reason humanoid robots won't sell. They're dangerous. Real robots in real factories that make real stuff can juggle car engines. And they can tear you limb from limb. So they work behind barriers and intrusion detection systems.

Hence soft robots. They're safe. Also useless.

> Also useless

Grow some imagination

  > That's one reason humanoid robots won't sell.

Speak for yourself, there'll be one in my household as soon as they're commercially affordable.

I would settle for a box in which I can dump sorted laundry and out of which falls folded laundry.

The second somebody manages this, I will rush out and throw my credit card at their store so hard it embeds itself in the counter like a ninja star.

This is the much more likely future of home robotics. Yes it will be a box, because it would be dangerous to let you stick your fingers inside that mechanism. It won't walk around.

Disaster response is a lie researchers tell themselves when building military hardware. The purpose of such robots would be to e.g. burrow into the collapsed tunnels at Fordow and confirm the uranium is there. (Or, alternatively, burrow into military tunnels to identify targets.)

https://xkcd.com/2128/

Zeta Jones bot

The first question a robotics investor will ask themselves is "will people want to have sex with it?"

Liquid crystal elastomers will most likely never be used in humans because, in order to drive the phase transition (mematic mesogens going from isotopic to anisotropic phase) necessary for macro scale work, the LCE has to be heated well beyond 100C. Even in non-thermal contexts, you need kilovolts to influence a doped bulk LCE. I just don't see it happening.

There's this YouTube channel called "soiboi soft"[0] that is doing many experiments with air-powered soft robotics and microfluidics.

It's a pretty cool concept and might have interesting albeit niche applications.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@soiboisoft

Article with better quality video here https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-origami-robot-built-prin...

These phase transition motive architectures all suffer from the same issues of not enough precision with repeatable positioning, very low speed, and limited control over the shaping of force/torque curve.

The only practical example are wax motors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motor

This entire article is simply bad university lab PR.

I don’t know much at all about materials - but wouldn’t this be a little “fuzzy”? If they’re using heat to expand/contract whatever material, I imagine there’s a degree of variance with the starting state / ending state - depending on the environment the “soft robot” is in.

A static amount of electricity may only be able to move the wings so much in a cold environment, right?

Ant Roach, pneubotics and inflatables by OtherLabs: https://www.youtube.com/@Otherlab/videos

one step closer to Rudy Rucker's "piezoplastic" from his Ware series

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