This robotic skin can give life to your stuffed toys

When designing tools to be used in the space, versatility is important. Each piece of material you bring with you will cost more. It is therefore convenient to have only one tool capable of performing multiple tasks. Plus: it's space! we never know what situations that you will encounter. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, Yale's robotic robot, and her team have been driven to develop what is basically a robotic skin – a flexible material that can animate any inanimate object.

The proper name of the material is OmniSkin, and it is composed of elastic sheets equipped with sensors and actuators. It can be fastened with zippers or other basic fasteners, and is modular, which means that each small sheet can be attached in different ways. "[They’re] like Legos, "said Kramer-Bottiglio Smithsonian.com. "They can be combined, separated and grouped according to different models."

Kramer-Bottiglio and the rest of his team at Yale describe OmniSkin in an article published last week at Science Robotics. They show how the material can be used for a variety of purposes: transforming foam arms into robotic grasping claws, building stand-alone objects and increasing human clothing. They even used it for a stuffed ride, wrapping OmniSkin leaves around the legs of a stuffed horse to make it vibrate on a table.

Obviously, this type of material does not match the usual robotics regarding attributes such as power and durability. For example, you could not build a Mars mobile from OmniSkin. But the design was inspired by a solicitation from NASA, who was looking for new flexible robotics that could be useful in space. That's why OmniSkin is lightweight and reusable. Astronauts can not plan each event, so it's important to have adaptable tools.

Credit: Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio / Yale University

"Future astronauts exploring another planet could quickly build a robot using robotic skins wrapped around deformable materials to which they have access and stick a camera on it, and then deploy the robot to explore small or dangerous spaces," Kramer said. Bottiglio.

Other solutions are also developed in this area, such as the Super Ball Bot; a NASA project to build a lightweight robot from connected poles and wires. It looks like a tangled mess, but the resulting object is strong enough to be fired at the surface of a planet without damage, and flexible enough to navigate the rocky terrain. OmniSkin could have similar uses in the future.

It seems that creating tools to meet the unexpected demands of space involves designing designs that are just as unexpected.