![A photo of starfish underwater]()
Soft robots are better suited to certain situations than traditional robots. When interacting with an environment, humans or other living things, the inherent softness built into the structure of a robot made of rubber, for example, is safer than metal. Soft robots are also better at interacting with an unstable or uncertain environment — if a robot contacts an unpredicted object, it can simply deform to the object rather than crashing.
This deformability flows directly into Zach Patterson's work in Carnegie Mellon University's
Soft Machines Lab. A Ph.D. candidate in
mechanical engineering, Patterson has created a soft robot inspired by the brittle star, a type of starfish that is relatively quick and agile. The robot, named PATRICK, is the first mobile and untethered underwater crawling soft robot.
