About: Soft Growing Robotics

Soft Growing Robotics is a subset of soft robotics concerned with designing and building robots that use robot body expansion to move and interact with the environment. Soft growing robots are built from compliant materials and attempt to mimic how vines, plant shoots, and other organisms reach new locations through growth. While other forms of robots use locomotion to achieve their objectives, soft growing robots elongate their body through addition of new material, or expansion of material. This gives them the ability to travel through constricted areas and form a wide range of useful 3-D formations. Currently there are two main soft growing robot designs: additive manufacturing and tip extension. Some goals of soft growing robotics development are the creation of robots that can explore