Watch This Noodle-Shaped Robot Autonomously Escape a Maze
You might not look at pasta the same way after seeing this robot.
Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Pennsylvania have created a rotini-shaped robot that can tumble through a maze without any help or guidance from a computer or human being. In a paper published Monday in the journal PNAS, the researchers made the robot out of a plasticky material shaped into a translucent corkscrew, able to navigate by interacting with the barriers of a maze and bouncing off of them like a Roomba does when it encounters a wall or an obstacle.
“These soft robots demonstrate a concept called ‘physical intelligence,’ meaning that structural design and smart materials are what allow the soft robot to navigate various situations, as opposed to computational intelligence,” Jie Yin, a mechanical engineer at North Carolina State University and co-author of the new paper, said in a press release.
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