Some see soft robots helping declining populations of pollinators do their jobs, or sifting through wreckage in the wake of a building collapse, or even performing simple, practical tasks in tight spaces; others see them traveling the oceans or traversing the insides of our bodies to scope out medical red flags.
Some, like Robert Katzschmann, an assistant professor of robotics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, see the need to tread a little more lightly and a lot more quietly in our world, which is one of the reasons he’s building soft robots: to help us better integrate with nature.
Fellow roboticist Xiaobo Tan, a Foundation Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, finds Katzschmann’s work inspiring. “He’s really working on cutting edge problems here. …He’s got a bio hybrid actuator [that] I would characterize as kind of a cyborg device, but basically combining biological and computing/mechanical elements to create something functional … I think this is great stuff.”
Dr. Tan commenting on ACM soft robotics story
