Soft robotics – machines made of flexible, muscle-like materials – can bend and stretch in fluid ways that put the rigid robots of old sci-fi movies to shame.
But the flexibility that lets them pick ripe tomatoes or navigate a search-and-rescue site comes at a cost: soft robotics are notoriously difficult to control.
Virginia Tech researchers are working to solve that problem using a new computing approach inspired by the complex architecture of neurons in the brain. [Read more…] about Virginia Tech researchers control soft robotics with ‘AI’s cousin’: ‘Reservoir computing’