Motion picture animation and video games are impressively lifelike nowadays, capturing a wisp of hair falling across a heroine’s eyes or a canvas sail snapping crisply in the wind. Collaborators from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Carnegie Mellon University have adapted this sophisticated computer graphics technology to simulate the movements of soft, limbed robots for the first time.
The findings were published May 6 in Nature Communications in a paper titled, “Dynamic Simulation of Articulated Soft Robots.”
“We have achieved faster than real-time simulation of soft robots, and this is a major step toward such robots that are autonomous and can plan out their actions on their own,” said study author Khalid Jawed, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “Soft robots are made of flexible…
