The
new excitement on the block is that we have just another big softy, but now you
see him, now you don’t.
Species
from chameleons to squids have an interesting ability to change color to blend
in with the background. Just the sort of ability many of us would have wished
when we ended up somewhere either over-dressed or under-dressed.
Some
while ago, Whitesides et al made a
soft tetrapod that could lurch, crawl and undulate about the place like
something you wouldn’t want to step on in poor light (1). It was tethered to
its driver via pneumatics driving its fluid actuators deep in its silicone
rubber body.
It
is now a horse of a different color. It has developed a circulatory system and
dyes can be pumped through its bendy body (2, 3). Not just plain dyes, but
light sensitive dyes like fluorescent dyes or heat sensitive dyes. There is local control of segment circuits so
it can exhibit color patterns.
So
we have a prototype soft, squidgy robot that can glow in the dark or hide in
your cabbage patch and listen to the sweet nothings that you’re whispering in
your neighbor’s shell-like auricular appendage.
This
little beastie has a big advantage – it’s cheap. Even better, I would think it’s
a great candidate for 3-D printing. But before we all rush out crying for our
own squidgy tetrapod for Christmas, they still have to crack the external drive
system and build the pneumatics into its body.
Computer
control would clearly go hand in hand with that. The only thing that we have
left to do is to define its mission statement so that it has a clear
understanding of its place in the world. We don’t want to envision a future
world with lots of cheap squidgy tetrapods running amok, changing color and
causing trouble.
- http://www.pnas.org/content/108/51/20400.full.pdf+html
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19286259
- http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6096/828.abstract
