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Building the Brain of Soft Robots

Elizabeth Gallardo creates the mechanisms that make robots move

Imagine a robot that can contour to the human body to assist with muscular rehabilitation, safely retrieve a jellyfish from the ocean without damaging it for biology research, wriggle through tight spaces for a search and rescue mission, or be run over by a car and bounce back to its original shape. These are all potentials of soft robotics—a field that explores the fabrication of robots composed of compliant materials such as cloth and rubber.

To realize that potential, though, the robots need a brain. That’s where Elizabeth Gallardo comes in. A PhD candidate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Gallardo designs and builds soft controllers composed of rubber and riddled with channels that dictate the robot’s movement by running fluid through them rather than electric current. In this video shot at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory, Gallardo describes how she creates soft circuits and controllers and her hopes for the future of soft robotics.

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