Down in the unfathomable depths of our oceans, freakishly bizarre-but-beautiful creatures thrive, having developed an incredible resistance to the bone-crushing pressures. Inspired by one such animal (the deep sea snailfish, or the hadal snailfish, properly known as Pseudoliparis swirei), engineers in China built a robot that can reach and operate in the deepest part of the ocean – the Marina Trench. The battery-powered silicone robot can withstand the extreme pressures there in the same way its natural counterpart does.
The robot’s super-ability is made possible through a distributed electronic system within a soft body. The engineers modeled the system after the snailfish’s distributed skull that’s filled with holes. The space reduces the stress at the interfaces between components under pressure.
The robot’s body has small side-fins, like the snailfish, built to enable swimming. The fins are connected to ‘muscles’ on the robot’s body, and when an electric current from the robot’s battery is applied to them, they contract. It was able to move 3.16 centimeters per second in a pool at 70 meters below sea level and the South China Sea at about 3,200 meters below sea level.
The robot survived for about 45 minutes at 35,000 feet beneath the surface, attached to a helper that recorded the procedure and monitored how successfully it could move.
This is the first soft robot to functioned in depths previously only reached by rigid, sturdy submersibles. The approach is also a cheaper and more practical way to protect the electronics in deep-sea devices. The scientists envision their machine exploring uncharted regions, helping to monitor and clean up pollution, among other things.
Soft robots can manipulate items more safely, a big plus for researchers collecting samples. They can even swim among schools of fish without disturbance, thereby allowing close-up study.
However, this new robot isn’t ready for action yet. The engineers still have a few flaws to fix, like how the robot can’t withstand sizable disturbances – so underwater currents could easily carry it off. Also, they need to optimize the device’s locomotor capabilities for practical applications.
Nevertheless, their work lays the foundation for next-gen resilient and reliable machines to explore and monitor the oceans.
