So robots.
Robots can be programmed to do the same task millions of times
with minimal error, something very difficult for us, right?
And it can be very impressive to watch them at work.
Look at them.
I could watch them for hours.
No?
But what is less impressive that if you take this robot
out of the factories
where the environments are not perfectly known and measured like here,
to do even a simple task which doesn't require much precision,
and this is what can happen.
I mean, opening a door, you don't require much precision.
(Laughter)
Or, a small error in the measurements,
you miss the ?? and that's it
(Laughter)
with no way of recovering most of the time.
So why is that?
Well, for many years,
robots have been designed to emphasize speed and precision,
and this translates in a very specific architecture.
If we take a robot term,
it's a very well-defined set of rigid links
and mortars who are called actuators,
they move the links above the joins.
In this ?? structure,
you have to perfectly measure your environment,
so what is around,
and you have to perfectly program every movement
of the robot joints,
because a small error can generate a very large fault,
so you can damage something or you can get your robot damaged
if something is harder.
So let's talk about them a moment,
and don't think about the brains of these robots
or how carefully we program them,
but rather look at their bodies.
There is obviously something wrong with it,
because what makes a robot precise and strong
also makes them ridiculously dangerous and ineffective in the real world,
because their body cannot deform
or better adjust to the interaction with the real world.
So think about the opposite approach,
being softer than anything else around you.
Well, maybe you think that you're not really able to do anything if you're soft,
probably.
Well, nature teaches us the opposite.
For example, at the bottom of the ocean under thousands of pounds
of ?? pressure,
a completely soft animal
can move and interact with a much stiffer object than him.
He works by carrying around this coconut shell
thanks to the flexibility of his tentacles,
which serve as both his feet and hands.
And apparently, an octopus can also open a jar.
It's pretty impressive, right?
But clearly, this is not enabled just by the brain of this animal,
but also by his body,
and it's a clear example, maybe the clearest example,
of embodied intelligence,
which is a kind of intelligence that all living organisms have.
We all have that.
Our body, its shape, material and structure,
plays a fundamental role during a physical task,
because we can conform to our environment
so we can succeed in a large variety of situations
without much planning or calculations ahead.
So why don't we put some of this embodied intelligence
into our robotic machines
to release them from relying on excessive work
on computation and sensing?
Well, to do that we can follow the strategy of nature,
because with evolution, she's done a pretty good job
in designing machines for environment interaction,
and it's easy to notice that nature uses soft material frequently
and stiff material sparingly.
And this is what is done in this new field or robotics
which is called soft robotics,
in which the main objective is not to make super-precise machines
because we've already got them,
but to make robots able to face unexpected situations in the real world,
so able to go out there.
And what makes a robot soft is first of all his compliant body,
which is made of materials or structures that can undergo very large deformations,
so no more rigid links,
and secondly to move them we use what we call distributed actuation,
so we have to control continuously the shape of this very deformable body,
which is the fact of having a lot of links and joints,
but we don't have any stiff structure at all.
So you can imagine that building a soft robot is a very different process
than stiff robotics, where you have links, gears, screws
that you must combine in a very defined way.
In soft robots, you just build your actuator from scratch
most of the time,
but you shape your flexible material
to the form that responds to a certain input.
For example here, you can just deform a structure
doing a fairly complex shape
if you think about doing the same with rigid links and joints,
and here what you use is just one input,
such as air pressure.
Okay, but let's see some cool examples of soft robots.
Here is a little cute guy developed by Harvard University,
and he works thanks to waves of pressure applied along its body,
and thanks to the flexibility he can also sneak under a low bridge,
keep walking,
and then keep walking a little bit different afterwards.
And it's a very preliminary prototype,
but they also built a more robust version
with power on board that can actually be sent out in the world
and face real-world interactions
like a car passing it over it,
and keep working.
(Laughter)
It's cute.
(Laughter)
Or a robotic fish which swims like a real fish does
in water simply because it has a soft tail with distributed actuation
using still air pressure.
That was from MIT,
and of course we have a robotic octopus.
This was actually one of the first projects developed
in this new field of soft robots.
Here you see the artificial tentacle,
but they actually built and entire machine
with several tentacles they could just throw in the water,
and you see that it can kind of go around and do submarine exploration
in a different way than rigid robots would do.
But this is very important for delicate environments such as coral reefs.
Let's go back to the ground.
Here you see the view
from a growing robot developed by my colleagues in Stanford.
You see the camera fixed on top.
And this robot is particular because using air pressure
it grows from the tip while the rest of the body
stays in firm contact with the environment.
And this is inspired by plants, not animals,
which grows via the material in a similar manner
so it can face a pretty large variety of situations.
But I'm a biomedical engineer,
and perhaps the application I like the most
it's in the medical field,
and it's very difficult to imagine a closer interaction with the human body
than actually going inside the body,
for example to inform a minimally invasive procedure.
And here, robots can be very helpful with the surgeon
because they must enter the body
using small holes and straight instruments,
and these instruments must interact with very delicate structures
in a very uncertain environment,
and this must be done safely.
Also bringing the camera inside the body,
so bringing the eyes of the surgeon inside the subject, I feel,
can be very challenging if you use a rigid stick,
like a classic endoscope.
With my previous research group in Europe,
we developed this self-camera robot for surgery,
which is very different from a classic endoscope