The maintenance of critical industrial components is often hindered by limited access, tortuous passages, and complex geometries. In highly constrained environments, inspection tasks are currently performed with borescopes, but even skilled operators struggle with hard-to-reach targets, and the limited mobility prevents in situ repair when defects are identified. Thanks to an … [Read more...] about A Continuum Robot for Remote Applications
Tendons
Tensegristats: Lightweight Untethered Morphing Robots
Flexible and shape-shifting structures are common in nature. Creating shape-shifting machines using rigid components requires complex design work. Soft robotic attempts are closer to the muscular hydrostats they mimic but are slow and inefficient untethered and do not generally allow large-scale shape change between forms. Here we present the idea of “tensegristat” robots in … [Read more...] about Tensegristats: Lightweight Untethered Morphing Robots