tl;dr Plastic robots powered by air are squishy like squid and can fit into tight places.

This is some seriously space age shit guys. The Whitesides Group from Harvard created these robots that are made of pneumatic and made of plastic. The robot has a bunch of little air pockets inside of it. If you’re clever about the way you inflate and deflate those pockets, the robots will move (like in the video above) or pick things up (like in the video below).

What’s REALLY cool about these robots is how they are made. They drew the design on a computer in something like google sketchup. Then they had a 3D printer make a mold from their drawing and filled this mold with plastic. Boom, done. In the world of robotics, that is fantastically easy. 

No motors. No nuts and bolts. No metal at all. Just plastic. 

The researchers envision these softbots going into disaster wreckage or holding body parts very softly while surgeons are doing their thing. 

The robots are pretty much ready for production to work as soft grippers. In order to do something more useful, like search for survivors in a plane crash, they’ll need a camera installed. That’s not too difficult. 

The catch? They still need to be tethered to an air supply and a computer controlling that air supply. That’s not a big deal for larger bots, but it’s a big hurdle for smaller bots like the ones in the videos. 

Now imagine, if you will, a swarm of these little squiddies coming at you. Creepy.

Physorg story.

tl;dr These tiny robots can work as a team, like all those nanobots in scifi movies.

A Harvard engineering team has developed what they call a “kilobot” (named for its ability to work in swarms of thousands, not because it will murder you in your sleep… or will it?).

These robots are small and cheap. They have short range communication capabilities. They basically vibrate on three little legs and chirp to each other with radio. That’s all they can do. 

The point of this research is to figure out how to control swarms of robots. It’s actually quite a difficult programming problem. The video demonstrates their ability to act like little ants, disperse, and follow the leader; these are pretty essential tasks for a swarm of nanobots.

Once the necessary control algorithms are developed, the task will be to make a more capable swarming robot. Something with a hand, or something that can fly like a helicopter.

So we’re nowhere near to the nanobots from I, Robot (movie) or the Dyson machines from Space Odyssey 2010, but we’re taking nanosteps.

Full story on physorg.