Under the Sea

Soft robots are better suited to certain situations than traditional robots. When interacting with an environment, humans or other living things, the inherent softness built into the structure of a robot made of rubber, for example, is safer than metal. Soft robots are also better at interacting with an unstable or uncertain environment - if a robot contacts an unpredicted object, it can simply deform to the object rather than crashing. This deformability flows directly into Zach Patterson's work in Carnegie Mellon University's Soft Machines Lab. A Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering , Patterson has created a soft robot inspired by the brittle star, a type of starfish that is relatively quick and agile. The robot, named PATRICK, is the first mobile and untethered underwater crawling soft robot.