A new device developed by Harvard University researchers makes it possible to safely catch soft or sensitive marine animals in a polyhedral box without damaging them, thanks to a new design inspired by origami. It is a robot arm whose petal-shaped fingers create a circular shape around an animal and can capture it without risk of injury.
The design is more straightforward than it looks, as the robot arm only needs one motor to control the entire joint structure. This function allows very simple control and is even easier to repair in the event of a failure.
Until now, the robot arm developed at Harvard has only been used to catch and release marine animals, but researchers hope that in the future they will be able to integrate cameras and sensors into the arm to collect information about what happens in the sphere, that is, where the animal is located once the device has it.
In this sense, the researchers hope that the robot arm can be further developed to determine the composition of the animal body, its size, and even its genetic sequencing. If this is achieved, experts can study fragile marine life in their native habitats and obtain information that is currently not available above the water.
Robert Wood, one of the Harvard team researchers who developed the device, said that the group’s collaboration with marine biology had opened the door for the soft-robotics and origami-inspired engineering industry to apply their technologies to solve problems in a completely different discipline.
Wood and his colleagues are currently working on an optimized version of the robot arm that shows more dexterity in more large animals.
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