With their ability to shapeshift and manipulate delicate objects, soft robots could work as medical implants, deliver drugs inside the body and help explore dangerous environments. But the squishy ...

Imagine placing a flat piece of plastic on a warm surface and watching it fold itself into a fully functional robot without human hands, motors or complex assembly. It may sound like science fiction, ...

The new millimeter-scale robot comes from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. The development could open up new avenues for microsurgery, microassembly and ...

The Japanese art of paper folding is called origami — from the Japanese words “oru” (to fold) and “kami” (paper).

The combined mental prowess of Harvard University and MIT has yielded a special kind of self-assembling robot that folds up like origami and crawls away. The prototype, which is built almost entirely ...

A new 3D printing technique can create paper-thin “magnetic muscles,” which can be applied to origami structures to make them move. By infusing rubber-like elastomers with materials called ...

Shape-morphing, insect-scale robots that feature an origami-inspired design and eight independently actuated degrees of freedom, powered by custom piezoelectric actuators for enhanced mechanical ...

A crawler robot made with the miura-ori origami pattern. The dark sections are affixed with thin "magnetic muscles" made by co-extruding rubber polymer and ferromagnetic particles, which move the ...

In China, researchers at Westlake University have made a “soft robot” by combining pig gelatin and cellulose derived from cotton. Inspired by Kresling origami, the 240-mm robotic arm features a ...

The big picture: While companies continue to improve robotic hardware, developing AI software to truly bring these machines to life has remained an elusive goal. This is especially disappointing given ...