This vacuum-activated modular robot is equally nasty and neat

Soft robots are a major area of research right now, but the general paradigm seems to be that you pump something (a muscle or tube) full of something else (air, fluid) causing it to change its shape. But a robot from Swiss roboticists does the opposite: its little muscles tense when the air in them is removed. It’s cool — but it also looks kind of gross.

I mean, come on:

Each little section has several muscles, each of which can be contracted to different degrees to twist that section and exert force in some direction. All in one direction and the bot bends over; do it rhythmically and it can walk, or at any rate wriggle along. Or the vacuum could be let out in a suction cup, allowing the bot to attach securely to a wall, as  you see up top.

It was developed by Jamie Paik and Matt Robertson at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), who describe it in a paper^[1] published in the new journal Science Robotics^[2].

And although other robot-like devices have used vacuum for various purposes — we had one on stage that used vacuum to safely grip fragile items — the researchers claim this is the first bot that works entirely by vacuum. The contractive action created by the vacuum  isn’t just unique, it’s practical, Paik told me in an email.

“Compared to expanding actuators, contraction is more similar to the function of biological muscle,” she said. “Without going in to more precise and detailed mimicry, this might be functionally enough an advantage in terms of applications; to mimic real muscles in cases...