EPFL roboticists have shown that when a modular robot shares power, sensing, and communication resources among its individual units, it is significantly more resistant to failure than traditional ...

If a soft-bodied robot uses rigid actuators to move its body, then it isn't really soft now, is it? An experimental new caterpillar-inspired bot gets around that conundrum by using soft, collapsible ...

The robot is made of segments that can fold into a flat disk and extend into a cylinder. Partial folds bend the robot and allow for motion and steering. Engineers at Princeton and North Carolina State ...

The next generation of soft robots might be folding and sliding as effortlessly as living tissue, say a team of engineers who have created “magnetic muscles” with 3D printing. Filling elastic, ...

Engineers at EPFL have demonstrated a modular robot that becomes more resilient as it gains more modules by sharing critical resources across its body. Led by the Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory, ...

A new 3-D printing technique can create paper-thin "magnetic muscles," which can be applied to origami structures to make them move. By infusing rubber-like elastomers with materials called ...

A crawler robot made with the miura-ori origami pattern. The dark sections are affixed with thin "magnetic muscles" made by co-extruding rubber polymer and ferromagnetic particles, which move the ...

Engineers created a catapillar-shaped robot that splits into segments and reassembles, hauls cargo, and crawls through twisting courses. Engineers at Princeton and North Carolina State University have ...