Paper Robots - Solution to Making Robots Not Crush Humans

Robotics has a problem: while there are hundreds of different ways of powering a robotic arm, the vast majority can crush and kill a human being. Scaling down the force until they won’t renders the robots too weak to interact.

But there’s a new proposal that might change this state of affairs: robots made out of paper.

Paper is very, very cheap. Paper also doesn’t stretch. It turns out, those two factors make it ideal for building robots that work closely with humans. The previous state of the art in non-Terminator robots had been plastic muscles, which have a tendency to stretch and warp out of shape. And, as researchers have found, paper muscles are still quite strong.

A team at Harvard University, led by George Whitesides, created paper mechanisms capable of bending, stretching, and generally shaping into useful shapes when powered by an air compressor. This was an expansion on their previous experiments at creating artificial squid muscles out of plastic.

These devices are basically just sheets of paper glued together. Paper formed into a bellows, for example, inflates when air is pumped in, and then contracts when the pressure is removed. But the surprising thing is how strong this simple mechanism is: an 8 gram mechanism that is 1 cm wide is capable of lifting a 1 kilogram weight, or roughly 125 times its weight.

Thanks to clever engineering, these pieces of paper can bend or stretch, depending on how they are folded. Anyone who has seen an origami master at work will be familiar with some of this flexibility.

These designs are not only simple and easy to make, they are incredibly cheap. After all, we’re talking about sheets of paper and glue, here.

What the researchers have discovered is that paper might be the ideal material for building cheap robots out of. As robots become more and more pervasive, there will be a push to make them cheaper and less deadly. Who knows, paper might turn out to be the ideal solution.

NewScientist Photo by : Advanced Functional Materials