Artificial origami-inspired muscles give soft robots superpowers

Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created origami-inspired artificial muscles that add strength to soft robots, allowing them to lift objects that are up to 1,000 times their own weight using only air or water pressure, giving much-needed strength to soft robots.
Not only can the artificial muscles move in many ways, they do so with impressive resilience. They can generate about six times more force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle can, and are also incredibly lightweight. An article about the research is published in PNAS (Press Release Wyss Institute, 27 November 2017).
Click here for the press release.
Click here for the published article (4.28 MB).

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