a robot that’s a real softie

THE latest revolutionary robot isn’t the metallic, costly machine you’d expect: It’s squishy like Silly Putty, wireless, battery-less and made for pennies by a 3-D printer.

Meet Octobot. It looks like a tiny octopus and is designed to mimic that slithery creature to get through cracks and tight places, making it ideal as a rescue robot.

A team at Harvard University has created a robot — actually about 300 of them, since they are so cheap to make — that is opposite of the common view of a robot. Soft, not hard. Flexible not rigid. It’s not mechanical, nor electrical. It’s powered by fluids. The discovery is described, photographed and on video in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday.

“It’s sort of a hybrid between octopus and robot,” said study author Jennifer Lewis, a Harvard professor of biologically inspired engineering. “We’ve done something that nobody’s been able to do.”

Soft robotics are important because “you’ve got these hard mechanical objects and soft humans” and when they interact, or collide, it can be a problem, Lewis said. That’s not the painful case with Octobot, which fits in the palm of a hand. It’s softer and more adaptive, she said.