See what this squishy octopus-inspired robot can do

The latest revolutionary robot isn’t the metallic, costly machine you’d expect: It’s squishy like Silly Putty, wireless, battery-less and made for pennies by a 3D printer.

Meet Octobot. It looks like a tiny octopus and is designed to mimic that slithery creature to get through cracks and tight places, making it ideal as a rescue robot.

A team at Harvard University has created a robot - actually about 300 of them, since they are so cheap to make - that is opposite of the common view of a robot. Soft, not hard. Flexibl,e not rigid. It’s not mechanical, nor electrical. It’s powered by fluids. The discovery is described, photographed and shown on video in the scientific journal Nature.  Cont'd...

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Boston Dynamics Webinar - Why Humanoids Are the Future of Manufacturing

Boston Dynamics Webinar - Why Humanoids Are the Future of Manufacturing

Join us November 18th for this Webinar as we reflect on what we've learned by observing factory floors, and why we've grown convinced that chasing generalization in manipulation—both in hardware and behavior—isn't just interesting, but necessary. We'll discuss AI research threads we're exploring at Boston Dynamics to push this mission forward, and highlight opportunities our field should collectively invest more in to turn the humanoid vision, and the reinvention of manufacturing, into a practical, economically viable product.