Origami-Inspired Robotic Crawlers Are Inching Their Way Into Your Next Colonoscopy
We’ve got robots that can skateboard, robots going to outer space, robots with human-like skin, and now robots that can… inch around like an earthworm. Scientists at Stanford and the Ohio State University banded together to create an origami-inspired tiny robotic crawler that shuffles around just like a tiny worm and looks so absolutely adorable doing so.
But this robot has loftier goals than just looking cute and feeling cute. As explained in a new study published March 30 in the journal Science Advances, the researchers constructed their crawler with flexible cylindrical units and a magnetic field that work to propel the yellow and blue robot forward through the repetitive movement of folding and expanding on itself. The aim is to one day use the man-made earthworm for exploration in confined spaces impossible for humans to navigate—especially for diagnostic medical procedures or to store and release vital medications within the human body.
The researchers borrowed techniques from a particular origami design called the Kresling pattern. It’s something you can actually make on your own: If you take a hollow tube of paper and crush it inward clockwise and again counterclockwise, you’ll end up with two spiral patterns going in opposite directions of each other. And it’s deceptively powerful: When the paper is folded and expanded, it generates torque to move the worm forward.
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