Soft skin-like robots you can put in your pocket

Stretchable skin-like robots that can be rolled up and put in your pocket have been developed by a University of Bristol team using a new way of embedding artificial muscles and electrical adhesion into soft materials.

This new advance, published in Soft Robotics, could create new thin and light robots for environmental monitoring and deployment in hazardous environments, robot grippers for delicate objects and new wearable technologies.

Traditional robots are rigid and incompliant, whereas soft robots are compliant and can stretch and twist to adapt to their environments. Until now, soft robots have separated their movement abilities from their capabilities to grip the surface they move on. Taking inspiration from biological skins and soft organisms like snails and slugs, researchers from Bristol's Faculty of Engineering, led by Professor of Robotics Jonathan Rossiter, have successfully demonstrated a new robotic skin that crawls across a surface by alternately contracting embedded artificial muscles and gripping the surface using electrical charges.