This Elephant-Impressed Robotic Walks on 3D Printed Muscle tissue and Bones – 3DPrint.com

A brand new elephant-inspired robotic can do a few of the most stunning duties, from gently plucking a flower with its trunk to powerfully kicking a bowling ball. It’s all because of a groundbreaking design strategy impressed by the physique of an elephant, which mixes sturdy legs and a comfortable, versatile trunk, and makes use of just one sort of 3D printed materials. What makes this robotic particular will not be what it’s fabricated from, however the way it’s designed.

The robotic was created by Professor Josie Hughes and her staff on the CREATE Lab, a part of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering on the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The staff additionally included postdoctoral researchers Qinghua Guan and Hung Hon Cheng, in addition to PhD pupil Benhui Dai.

As an alternative of utilizing totally different supplies for comfortable and arduous elements, the staff discovered a method to form the within of a single materials utilizing particular inside buildings, or lattices. By altering the sample of those lattices, they will make the fabric act comfortable in some areas and stiff in others. This lets them construct lifelike machines that may transfer with power and adaptability, similar to actual animals.

Lattices are like miniature constructing blocks or scaffolds inside a cloth. By altering the form and sample of those blocks, the researchers might management how stiff or comfortable every a part of the robotic could be. This new design methodology offers engineers extra management over how a robotic strikes and feels, while not having totally different supplies or difficult manufacturing.

Elephant robotic demonstrates 3D printing expertise. Picture courtesy of EPFL.

Rewriting Elephant Anatomy

In nature, animals transfer with the assistance of muscle groups, tendons, and bones that every one have totally different stiffness and power. For instance, an elephant’s trunk is comfortable and versatile, whereas its legs are sturdy. The researchers wished to repeat this vary of motion and power in a robotic, however with out making issues too difficult or heavy.

To do that, they invented two important methods. The primary is named Topology Regulation (TR), which lets them progressively mix two totally different lattice shapes to create elements that transition from comfortable to stiff. The second is Superposition Programming (SP), a way that stacks or rotates these lattice patterns to regulate how sturdy or versatile the fabric is in particular instructions.

Collectively, these methods permit the staff to design robotic elements with customized motion and power, just by altering the form of the fabric’s inside construction.

The robotic elephant they constructed is a working instance of those methods. It has an extended, comfortable trunk and 4 sturdy legs.

Elephant robotic pinches a flower with its robotic trunk. Picture courtesy of EPFL.

The researchers used TR to create a clean, versatile trunk that may bend, twist, and curl. It’s constructed from lattices that slowly change form alongside the trunk’s size. This enables it to grip objects, corresponding to a flower, with out crushing them. The trunk is split into three sections, described as twisting, bending, and helical, that work collectively utilizing solely 4 motors and some tendons.

“This strategy allows the continual spatial mixing of stiffness profiles and permits for an infinite vary of blended unit cells. It’s significantly fitted to replicating the construction of muscular organs like an elephant trunk,” says Dai.

In the meantime, the robotic’s legs use SP to create sturdy joints and bones. These joints can transfer in a single or two instructions, permitting the robotic to stroll, stability, and even kick a bowling ball. Some elements of the legs are stiff and load-bearing, whereas others are softer and extra adaptive, similar to actual elephant legs.

Every part of the robotic is designed to carry out a selected movement or activity. The toes, for instance, are stiffer on the entrance for assist however softer on the again, just like the cushioned heels of actual elephants, clarify the researchers of their examine titled “Lattice construction musculoskeletal robots: Harnessing programmable geometric topology and anisotropy,” which was printed in Science Advances in July 2025.

Elephant robotic kicks bowling ball. Picture courtesy of EPFL.

Along with these structural improvements, the staff additionally demonstrated how programmable lattices can assist a number of sorts of anatomical motion.

For his or her elephant mannequin, this twin programming functionality enabled the fabrication of a number of totally different tissue varieties with distinctive ranges of motion, together with a sliding airplane joint (discovered within the small bones of the foot), a bending uniaxial joint (discovered within the knee), and a two-way bending biaxial joint (discovered within the toes). The staff was even in a position to replicate the advanced movement of the elephant’s muscular trunk by engineering separate lattice sections devoted to twisting, bending, and rotating actions, whereas sustaining clean and steady transitions between them.

Hughes says that along with modifying the froth materials or incorporating new cell shapes, their distinctive foam lattice expertise construction affords many thrilling prospects for future robotics analysis.

“Like honeycomb, the strength-to-weight ratio of the lattice might be very excessive, enabling very light-weight and environment friendly robots. The open foam construction is well-suited for movement in fluids, and even affords potential for together with different supplies, like sensors, inside the construction to offer additional intelligence to foams.”

One Materials, Tens of millions of Potentialities

Though just one sort of 3D printable materials is used to make the robotic, the design prospects are large. By altering the form and format of the inner lattices, the staff says they will create over one million totally different cell varieties, and probably extra.

Every lattice block can have a special stiffness, relying on its form or layering. Some are designed to withstand bending, whereas others are designed to twist simply, and a few can do each. This offers the robotic lifelike motion and precision, whereas nonetheless being light-weight and easy to construct.

Your complete robotic was 3D printed utilizing elastic resin and assembled with tendons and motors to regulate motion. Due to the open lattice construction, the robotic can also be lighter, quicker to print, and even in a position to transfer in water.

In line with the examine, the researchers had been impressed by how evolution has formed animals for particular actions. Snakes are versatile, cheetahs retailer power of their tendons, and human palms are exact. The staff believes robots ought to be in-built related methods, tailored to the roles they should do.

Conventional 3D printing makes use of a number of supplies or difficult strategies to make robots with totally different physique elements. However these new lattice-based designs permit every thing to be made in a single printing course of, utilizing a single materials.

Design of the elephant robotic. Picture courtesy of EPFL.

Not Only for Elephants

For future robots, this might translate to quicker and cheaper manufacturing, and even simpler customization. The truth is, this new method of constructing robots might be utilized in many fields, like healthcare, the place customized prosthetic limbs might mimic actual muscle groups and bones. In search and rescue, robots that transfer like animals might be designed to get via tight or harmful areas. And in addition in manufacturing, light-weight robotic arms might be made to deal with delicate or heavy objects. Principally, these lattice buildings deliver robots one step nearer to shifting and behaving like residing creatures.

The staff says their strategies might be expanded to even stiffer or softer supplies sooner or later. In addition they see potential in including sensors or different clever techniques contained in the lattice foam, creating robots that aren’t solely sturdy and versatile but in addition clever.

For now, the elephant robotic is proof that construction issues simply as a lot as materials. By shaping a single substance into thousands and thousands of varieties, engineers have unlocked a brand new degree of management over how robots look, transfer, and really feel. As robotics continues to evolve, any such “programmable construction” might change the best way machines are designed.

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