Octopus-Inspired Robot Could Change Underwater Exploration Forever | FP Videos | N18G

[00:00:41]We have a proposal new version of continuous soft robotic arm.

[00:00:49]Which is inspired by octopus in particular by the capability of this animal to explore the environment by using sensorized suckers.

[00:01:01]To detect different object and also to interact with different kind of environments.

[00:01:41]So we embedded in the suckers and the artificial suckers of our arm optoelectronics sensors. So in particular the sucker each sucker can detect contact the direction of contact and even forces, all integrated in a very, uh, miniaturized, electronic boards.

[00:02:36]Uh, the robot, in fact, is so soft, so adaptable like the natural system, that can adapt even to very constrained environments to retrieve objects of different shapes, of different, uh, weights, um, adapting its morphology, its, uh, behavior to the external environment.

[00:03:16]These are the principles that we are trying to implement also in our robot to have a very complex, uh, tasks, so we can really, uh, operate in dynamic conditions. But, what is a very important at the same time is to reduce the energy, the energy consumption, the computational load, because, uh, we need to develop robots that can operate for longer time in a safe way in natural, uh, environments.

[00:04:00]>> In theory, we could also think to combine such a feature set in a humanoid, for example. Now, we could also we could enhance our grasping capability with a suckers from an octopus operating in wet condition, for example.