KAIST, Caltech and NTU build BeetleBot, a palm-sized soft robot steered by finger bends that sends back video and touch

KAIST said on Oct 13 that a team led by Kim Sang-ouk of its materials science department, with Wei Gao's group at Caltech and Hirotaka Sato's at Nanyang Technological University, built BeetleBot, a small soft robot modelled on a beetle that walks and grips with 3D-printed liquid-crystal-elastomer artificial muscles, Robot Newspaper (irobotnews) reported.

The robot carries a small camera and a pressure sensor in a jaw-shaped soft gripper, and the operator steers it with a stretchable carbon-nanotube sensor patch on a finger whose signals are mapped to four commands (forward, left, right, grip) sent over Bluetooth, closing a two-way loop between user and robot; the team demonstrated it avoiding obstacles and carrying an object.

The paper, "BeetleBot: An integrated bioinspired soft robot for multimodal sensing and adaptive interaction", appeared in Science Advances on Aug 19 (DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aeg8849), with first author Kim In-ho, now at Sungkyunkwan University.

The researchers said actuation speed, energy efficiency and power supply must improve before field use in inspection or exploration, so this remains lab work rather than a product in MEKAWIRE's terms.