soft robotics

dutch-scientists-built-a-brainless-soft-robot-that-runs-on-air 

Dutch scientists built a brainless soft robot that runs on air 

Science, soft robotics, soft robots / /

Most robots rely on complex control systems, AI-powered or otherwise, that govern their movement. These centralized electronic brains need time to react to changes in their environment and produce movements that are often awkwardly, well, robotic.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A team of Dutch scientists at the FOM Institute for Molecular and Atomic Physics (AMOLF) in Amsterdam built a new kind of robot that can run, go over obstacles, and even swim, all driven only by the flow of air. And it does all that with no brain at all.

Sky-dancing physics

“I was in a lab, working on another project, and had to bend a tube to stop air from going through it. The tube started oscillating at very high frequency, making a very loud noise,” says Alberto Comoretto, a roboticist at AMOLF and lead author of the study. To see what was going on with the tube, Comoretto set up a high-speed camera and recorded the movement. He found that the movement resulted from the interplay between the air pressure inside the tube and the state of the tube itself.

When there was a kink in the tube, the increasing pressure pushed that kink along the tube’s length. That caused the pressure to decrease, which enabled a new kink to appear and the cycle to repeat. “We were super excited because we saw this self-sustaining, periodic, asymmetric motion,” Comoretto told Ars.

The first reason for Comoretto’s excitement was that the flapping tube in his lab was driven by the kind of airflow physics that Peter Marshall, Doron Gazit, and Aireh Dranger harnessed to build their famous dancing “Fly Guys” for the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996. The second reason was that asymmetry and periodicity he saw in the tube’s movement pattern were also present in the way all living things moved, from single-celled organisms to humans.

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this-mantis-shrimp-inspired-robotic-arm-can-crack-an-egg

This mantis shrimp-inspired robotic arm can crack an egg

biomimicry, biorobotics, Mantis shrimp, robotics, Science, soft robotics / /

This isn’t the first time scientists have looked to the mantis shrimp as an inspiration for robotics. In 2021, we reported on a Harvard researcher who developed a biomechanical model for the mantis shrimp’s mighty appendage and built a tiny robot to mimic that movement. What’s unusual in the mantis shrimp is that there is a one-millisecond delay between when the unlatching and the snapping action occurs.

The Harvard team identified four distinct striking phases and confirmed it’s the geometry of the mechanism that produces the rapid acceleration after the initial unlatching by the sclerites. The short delay may help reduce wear and tear of the latching mechanisms over repeated use.

New types of motion

The operating principle of the Hyperelastic Torque Reversal Mechanism (HeTRM) involves compressing an elastomeric joint until it reaches a critical point, where stored energy is instantaneously released.

The operating principle of the Hyperelastic Torque Reversal Mechanism (HeTRM) involves compressing an elastomeric joint until it reaches a critical point, where stored energy is instantaneously released. Credit: Science Robotics, 2025

Co-author Kyu-Jin Cho of Seoul National University became interested in soft robotics as a graduate student, when he participated in the RoboSoft Grand Challenge. Part of his research involved testing the strength of so-called “soft robotic manipulators,” a type often used in assembly lines for welding or painting, for example. He noticed some unintended deformations in the shape under applied force and realized that the underlying mechanism was similar to how the mantis shrimp punches or how fleas manage to jump so high and far relative to their size.

In fact, Cho’s team previously built a flea-inspired catapult mechanism for miniature jumping robots, using the Hyperelastic Torque Reversal Mechanism (HeTRM) his lab developed. Exploiting torque reversal usually involves incorporating complicated mechanical components. However, “I realized that applying [these] principles to soft robotics could enable the creation of new types of motion without complex mechanisms,” Cho said.

Now he’s built on that work to incorporate the HeTRM into a soft robotic arm that relies upon material properties rather than structural design. It’s basically a soft beam with alternating hyperelastic and rigid segments.

“Our robot is made of soft, stretchy materials, kind of like rubber,” said Cho. “Inside, it has a special part that stores energy and releases it all at once—BAM!—to make the robot move super fast. It works a bit like how a bent tree branch snaps back quickly or how a flea jumps really far. This robot can grab things like a hand, crawl across the floor, or even jump high, and it all happens just by pulling on a simple muscle.”

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