Human hands are remarkable pieces of machinery, so it’s no wonder many robots are designed after their creators. The amount of computation required to properly attenuate the grip strength and position of a hand is no joke though, so what if you took a tentacular approach to grabbing things instead?

Inspired by ocean creatures, researchers found that by using a set of pneumatically-controlled tentacles, they could grasp irregular objects reliably and gently without having to faff about with machine learning or oodles of sensors. The tentacles can wrap around the object itself or intertwine with each other to encase parts of an object in its gentle grasp.

The basic component of the device is 12 sections “slender elastomeric filament” which dangle at gauge pressure, but begin to curl as pressure is applied up to 172 kPa. All of the 300 mm long segments run on the same pressure source and are the same size, but adding multiple sized filaments or pressure sources might be useful for certain applications.

We wonder how it would do feeding a fire or loading a LEGO train with candy? We also have covered how to build mechanical tentacles and soft robots, if that’s more your thing.

While it doesn’t look like a traditional robot, the hydrogel robot from [Zi Liang Wu] forms a möbius strip and can be activated by light. They also experimented with shaping the hydrogels as a Seifert ribbon.

The key is that the hydrogels contain gold nanoparticles. Light heats the gold particles and this causes the hydrogels to move. The connections between the strips of hydrogels causes them to move in predictable ways. You can see a video about the experiments below.

These robots aren’t going to be for warehouse or factory work. But they can do tasks like collecting plastic beads, something difficult for conventional robots to do. They also hope to demonstrate that these soft robots could work in the body for taking samples or delivering a drug, although it isn’t apparent how light would get to them inside your body.

The dark side of the material tends to turn towards the light. The continuous loop structure means it never runs to the end of its travel. Watching it move on a string is pretty impressive.

Crawling and slithering robots may be the answer for certain specialized applications. After all, it works well in nature.