This Machine Will Hug Your 'Soft Bodies' and Force Them to Be Twitchy Robots

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Have you ever looked at a length of foam or a teddy bear and wished that it could writhe its way across the floor like an ungainly worm?Well, problem solved: A research team at Yale has developed a robotic system that can wrap around soft objects (including people) and push and pull on them to make them movThe robotic system, developed in the lab of Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, an engineering professor at the university, is designed to be a general-purpose machine for making anything that is sufficiently soft move. In a paper published yesterday (Sept. 19) in the journal Science Robotics, the researchers wrote that the same "OmniSkin" can be used on a wide range of different "soft bodies" to get them "We can take the skins and wrap them around one object to perform a task — locomotion, for example — and then take them off and put them on a different object to perform a different task, such as grasping and moving an object," Kramer-Bottiglio said in a statement. "We can then take those same skins off that object and put them on a shirt to make an active wearable devic video accompanying the paper in Science Robotics shows the OmniSkins wrapped around several different objects to make the objects heave themselves across a table. It then shows them wrapped around a person's back as a posture-correcting device. Finally, it causes a stuffed horse to… sort of slowly wiggle its bound legs in a walking motion. The researchers it might be useful for giving some semblance of robotic animation to a teddy bear.

The project is a bit funny-looking, but Kramer-Bottiglio said it has a serious purpose: to help NASA prepare for the unknown environments of deep space exploration. NASA has signaled that it's interested in multifunctional, squishy robots that can adapt to unpredictable tasks in deep space.