Digital Doctor
Well-known member
As they've done since the dawn of life, the worms crawl in and the worms crawl out —only now one of them is using wires and springs to do it.
Researchers at MIT, Harvard, and South Korea's Seoul National University this week revealed a soft, crawling robot that gets around via "peristalsis," the ambulatory mechanism of squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of the body used by earthworms, snails, and other creepy-crawly invertebrates, MIT News reported.
The team's "Meshworm" has a flexible tube for a body and a thin wire "muscle" made of a nickel and titanium shape-memory alloy that's wound around the tube to create worm-like segments on the robot (see video below). The application of heat in the form of an electrical current causes the wire muscle to stretch and contract, propelling Mesworm forward inch by inch, the scientists explained in the current issue of the journal IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408356,00.asp
