Starfish-Inspired Soft Robot Can Slither Under Doors

Although starfish are fascinating organisms, there is also something fundamentally strange about them from a human perspective. For many marine animals, the same is true. They all seem a little strange to us since they all developed in a world that is very different from the one we live in now, especially when we watch them move. It follows that a soft robot with starfish inspiration will come out as extremely strange, if not downright frightening.

A soft robot created by Harvard is built of elastomers and moves by having air pumped into its muscles. It can move in a variety of ways, including walking and crawling, and it has the ability to inflate itself to fit through gaps and under doors. The potential for future developments that would see an autonomous soft robot able to fit into areas a typical, rigid robot could never reach seem evident, even though the model Harvard exhibited requires being connected to a hose system in order to manage the flow of air.