Boffins pump hot, vivid fluid into squidgy robostarfish Roboboffins have come up with a way to disguise their soft-bodied, multi-limbed robostarfish, by using colour to camouflage its silicone body. Last year, Harvard researchers came up with a squishy cephalopod robot that could do the limbo, wriggling through a 2cm gap. Now the same scientists have figured out how to hide the …
I had to check my calendar, just to confirm April 1 hadn't come around again.
This is not a 'robot' its a rubber sack and some tubes, more worthy of a high-school science project than a technology news item.
Does it sense the colour its resting on and decide?, can it self-adapt? - I think not. Is it's not even remotely self-contained, probably having an array of machinery off-screen.
These guys must have to mix up some colour in advance, knowing what surface their test is on. And the movement technology, is that really going to fly in the real world applications - a sac that jerks its way very slowly in some barely controlled direction..
/rant
Is he trying to fool the ladies? He is a geek playing with robot toys, lots of electronics and computers involved, I don't think it'll work.
OTOH, he creates semi-soft wiggling rubber things. Softly vibrating rubber toys could be adapted to certain functions which cannot be mentioned on an IT website. So maybe the disguise is required to protect his identity in the prudish US.
...this camouflage system is particularly tied to squidgy robots.
There's an element of synergy, as the flexy nature of the ink tubes allow the robots' core squidgyness to be preserved, but you could just as well put a flexy skin full of camouflage tubes over the top/around a lot of olde-type rigid robots.
Then put the ink tanks/power source/sensors/control systems inside the rigid core, something that seems far closer to doable than making the 100% squidgy setup autonomous.
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