'Robot skin' to be robotized by being worn on ordinary plush toys and tubes will be developed

Robot "is reminiscent of a hard device made of metal and other machines, the research team of Yale University 's robot engineers attached a robot made from soft material to an object such as a stuffed animal and figurine, We have developed " robot skin " that can be moved as a robot to a robot.

OmniSkins: Robotic skins that turn inanimate objects into multifunctional robots | Science Robotics
http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/3/22/eaat 1853

High-tech 'skins' turn everyday objects into robots | Science News
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/high-tech-skins-turn-everyday-objects-robots

'Robotic Skins' turn everyday objects into robots - ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180919144918.htm

Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio , Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University, developed a "robot skin" that allows users to create their own robots. Robotic skins are applied not only to robots created with specific work in mind but also to various scenes from search and rescue to work as wearable devices.

Robot skin is a soft material elastic sheet embedded with sensors and actuators developed in Kramer-Bottiglio's laboratory. By attaching a robot skin to an easy-to-deform stuffed toy or easy-to-bend tube, it is possible to move the attached object. According to the characteristics of the attached object and the method of attaching the robot skin, it is possible to cause various objects to move.

Kramer-Bottiglio says about robot skins, "By wrapping an object with a robot skin, you can move the object to a given position, for example, remove the robot skin if the object reaches that location, It is possible to reattach to an object and then grab things or move it. " Robotic skins can be attached to objects on top of themselves in many layers, and more complicated movements are possible, such as bending while shrinking objects by stacking layers.

Clicking on the image below will play animated GIF (about 2.5 MB capacity) as if the stuffed animals with robot skins walk with tokotsuko.

Also, in the movie below, you can see how objects with robot skins move on the ground and move as you slacken.

High-tech 'skin' creates a variety of soft bots on the fly | Science News


A researcher makes a single stick ......

I will wind the robot skin around. The robot skin is packed with a pouch that swells when gas is filled (filled), a nickel titanium coil that shrinks when heated by current, and can deform shape with Gunegune.

Actually watching the object with the robot skin wrapped in various ways ......

There was also a thing that rolled and rolled forward, there were things that bent the body like a caterpillar.

Even if it is attached to a footless object like a stuffed animal, it seems to be able to go forward with a jiwiwa by contraction movement.

At the time of article creation, Kramer-Bottiglio thought that robotic skins would need to connect tubes to feed current and gas, but in the future all devices could be made wireless.

Kramer - Bottiglio thought that development of robot skins came up when NASA was asked to develop a soft robot system. Later, Kramer-Bottiglio, who developed a robot skin in partnership with NASA, says, "It may be possible to use robot skins for space exploration."