Soft robot that grows like vines may aid rescue operations

Boston: Stanford scientists have developed a new soft robot equipped with cameras that can 'grow' like a vine into tiny nooks and crevices to look for people trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building.

The robot is inspired by natural organisms that cover distance by growing – such as vines, fungi and nerve cells.

"Essentially, we're trying to understand the fundamentals of this new approach to getting mobility or movement out of a mechanism," said Allison Okamura, professor at the Stanford University in the US.

To investigate what their robot can do, the group created prototypes that move through various obstacles, travel toward a designated goal, and grow into a free-standing structure.

The robot could serve a wide range of purposes, particularly in the realms of search and rescue and medical devices, the researchers said.

The robot is a tube of soft material folded inside itself, like an inside-out sock, that grows in one direction when the material at the front of the tube everts, as the tube becomes right-side-out.

In the prototypes, the material was a thin, cheap plastic and the robot body everted when the scientists pumped pressurised air into the stationary end.