A soft robot that navigates its environment through growth

A soft robot that navigates its environment through growth

Across kingdoms and length scales, certain cells and organisms navigate their environments not through locomotion but through growth. This pattern of movement is found in fungal hyphae, developing neurons, and trailing plants, and is characterized by extension from the tip of the body, length change of hundreds of percent, and active control of growth direction. This results in the abilities to...

Aquaculture Navigates Through Troubled Waters

A sense of self-worth: energy taxis provides insight into how Helicobacter pylori navigates through its environment.

The ability to perceive and respond appropriately to environmental cues is an essential prerequisite to the survival and adaptation of microorganisms to changes in their surroundings. One of the best-understood responses involves the chemotaxis two-component signal transduction system in Escherichia coli, which functions to relay sensory information about the surroundings to the flagellar motil...

A Robot That Improves Its Ability To Learn

The use of machine learning is attractive in the design of autonomous robots, since it enables robots to adapt to the unforeseen. However, one of the key bottlenecks of current machine learning algorithms is the enormous sample complexity, which appears to prohibit their usage in all but the simplest of robotic domains. To make machine learning more practical in such domains, more powerful algo...

A Soft Electronics-Free robot

Biomimetic, entirely soft robots with animal-like behavior and integrated artificial nervous systems will open up totally new perspectives and applications. However, until now all presented studies on soft robots were limited to partly soft designs, since all designs at least needed conventional, stiff, electronics to sense, process signals and activate actuators. We present the first soft robo...