NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., June 28 (UPI) -- The only vehicles that can survive falls and keep driving through rough terrain tend to be in movies, but scientists have created a small vehicle that can do just that.
A small vehicle with squishy tires and a soft motor survived falls and kept moving over rocks and under water, suggesting the concept could be useful for everything from disaster rescue to exploration of other planets, according to researchers at Rutgers University.
While squishy tires are helpful to a soft robot, the real leap for the scientists is in their soft motor, which provides torque without bending -- the results of working to eliminate metal from the vehicle so that it would be unaffected by electromagnetic fields in harsh environments.
"If you build a robot or vehicle with hard components, you have to have many sophisticated joints so the whole body can handle complex or rocky terrain," Xiangyu Gong, a doctoral student at Rutgers, said in a press release. "For us, the whole …
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