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A new study from Switzerland shows the world’s first robot elephant — 3D-printed to pick flowers and roll bowling balls by mimicking biological tissues.
What is this innovative technology?
A team of researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has created a programmable lattice structure that can morph into different shapes. This is what allows the elephant robot to make flexible movements. For its legs, the team used a stiffer, ‘bone-like’ material that keeps the little elephant from toppling.
The researchers demonstrated the lattice design’s advantages by showing how the elephant carefully plucks a flower with its trunk and pushes a bowling ball. In a presentation video, the elephant strikes a small ball against ten pins, knocking down seven of them. The lattice, made from foam, consists of numerous individual blocks that can be combined in different configurations. The team says this technology can create more than a million configurations. This, in turn, will enable the production of lightweight and adaptive robots, Live Science reported.
‘We used this technology to create the elephant robot, mimicking the musculoskeletal system; the soft trunk can twist, bend, and rotate, while the hip, knee, and ankle joints are stiffer,’ said the lead author of the study, Zinhua Guan.
Most robots, including advanced humanoids, are clumsy compared with humans and animals. Human movement is produced by a network of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones that work together — a complex structure that’s hard to replicate in robots.
A Breakthrough in Evolutionary Engineering
The elephant’s trunk is an extraordinary product of evolution. It contains about 90,000 bundles of muscle fibers known as muscle fascicles. These allow the elephant to use its trunk as a multifunctional tool.
The lattice’s complexity comes from its individual cells. These cells have two main geometric shapes that provide different levels of stiffness and deformation. Researchers can also create hybrid forms that vary between these two primary shapes, opening up even more possibilities.
Benhui Dai, a graduate student at the EPFL lab and co-author of the study, said, ‘Our technology enables continuous spatial mixing of stiffness profiles and allows for the creation of numerous complex structures.’
The results of the study were published in the journal Science Advances.
