- This is a robot that can grow to hundreds of times its size, and it can't be stopped
by adhesives or spikes. Although it looks kind
of simple and cheap, it has dozens of potential applications, including, one day maybe saving your life. This video is sponsored by Morning Brew, the free daily newsletter. Now I made a video before
about a soft truss robot. And this is also a soft robot, but very different in how
it works and what it can do. These robots can be made
out of almost any material, but they all follow the
same basic principle. Powered by compressed air,
they grow from the tip. (air hissing)
(object rustling) - That's good. - And this allows the robot
to pass through tight spaces, and also over sticky surfaces. - Something like a car
will get stuck to it. (car winding) It gets stuck in the wheels. Now, if I do the same
thing with the vine robot, see the robot is able to extend... - It can navigate this
curvy and twisted passageway effortlessly, which suggests some of the applications it's well-suited for. Now you might think spikes
would be the downfall of an inflatable robot, but even if it's punctured, as long as you have
sufficient air pressure, the robot keeps going. - And you might be able to hear it. (air hissing)
It's actually leaking now, so I'll have to turn up the pressure. (object rustling)
(air hissing) This by itself is not yet a robot, but once we add steering,
a camera, some sensors, and maybe some intelligence as
to where we're directing it, then we could say it's a robot. So this is sort of the
backbone of our robot. This is what allows us to
build our type of robots. - So where did the idea
for this device come from? - I had a vine in my
office that was on a shelf, and it was kind of out of the sunlight. And over the course of like a year or so, it slowly grew out this tender roll out and around the edge of the shelf and towards the sunlight. I said, "That's a pretty cool
thing it just did," right? So I started thinking, "Well is there a way you
can do that robotically?" - The solution is really
elegant in its simplicity. Just take some airtight tubing
and fold it in on itself. It's kind of like a water wiggle, those toys that are really hard to hold. (air hissing)
When you inflate it with compressed air, it starts
growing out from the tip. And if you want the tube to
always bend at a certain spot, you could just tape the
tubing on the outside to shorten one of the sides. For example, you could tape
it into a helical shape to create a deployable antenna. What about getting them to retract? - Yeah, that's a challenging problem. When you're in a constrained environment, all you really have to do is pull on, we call it the tail, so the material that is passing through the core of the body, you pull on it and it basically ungrows, it just goes back inside itself. Now, if you're in a big
open area like this, and you try pulling on that, instead of inverting, so retracting, it tends to kind of coil
up and make a ugly shape. - And the engineers have come up with ways to retract the tube to
prevent it from buckling using internal rollers. But the two doesn't have
to be the same diameter the whole way along, here there's actually
a much wider section, think of it like a pillow that's packed into the end of the robot. - Yeah, if you could
sit cross-legged on it. - Cross-legged on the table. This sounds (groans) super sketchy. - So it grows underneath
the table just as usual, and then as the pillow
part starts inflating, (object clattering)
(man mumbles) Is this not good, or is this okay? It can actually lift me up. So my balance is not great as we can see. - You're standing on it. - Stand on it?
- Yeah. - What's amazing is that this
doesn't require much pressure above atmospheric, just a 10th of an atmosphere applied over a large
area like a square meter can lift something as
heavy as 1000 kilograms, all the while remaining soft. (object rustling)
Oh. Whoa, (sighs) that was great. That's the paradoxical
thing about pressure. You can get a large overall
force with low pressure as long as the area is large enough. What sort of area is
that, that pillow there? - It's 600 square inches. All right, so with one
PSI it's 600 pounds. - Yeah.
- Yeah. (laughs) - Two PSI is 1200 pounds.
- That's just crazy. And the whole time it feels really soft. - Yeah, 'cause there's
a couple PSI, right? - It's important that
the device is still soft so it doesn't hurt anyone. - So you can design these things to have cross-section that
changes along its length. So it can be a very small body that could grow into, for
example, a collapsed building and potentially lift a large object off someone who's trapped, or maybe in a car crash
or something like that. It can apply huge forces with very soft
(air whooshing) and lightweight cheap material. - These robots can also be deployed in search and rescue operations by attaching sensors like
a camera onto the front. - These robots are actually
really hard to stop. So you can take them,
grow them into a clutter, potentially a class building
or something like that, and they will continue to go somewhere. And alternative is they're so cheap, I mean, they're basically free. You could grow a hundred
of them, let's say, into a collapsed building
with some sensing on them, and maybe only one of them finds somebody. I mean, that's a huge success if it does. - But how do you keep a camera connected to the front of the robot when
it grows out from the tip? Well, one way is to use an end cap which allows that camera
just to stay on the front, pushed from behind by the robot, but there are other
mechanisms of attachment. The tiny wireless camera is
mounted on an external frame, but this frame interlocks
with an internal frame which is actually inside
the pressurized part of the robot body. It's similar to how a
roller coaster's wheels go around the track. So this prevents the
camera from falling off as the robot grows. What's really interesting is how the vine robot
can be actively steered. They attach artificial
muscles to the robot. (air hissing) So the way this muscle works is that if you inflate
it, it expands sideways, which leads to it contracting in length. - We don't actually use these much anymore because although it's soft,
it's still somewhat stiff. So what we use instead are simply tubes of this
ripstop nylon fabric with the braid oriented at 45 degrees. So in this sense we just have one single
layer of airtight fabric. (air hissing) This is the main robot body here, then we have three pneumatic
muscles connected to it. Now, these three muscles are each connected to their own air supply connected to regulators over here. As the robot extends from the tip, we can steer it by shortening
and lengthening the sides. So, you know, just the way your hand works is if I shorten this tendon in my arm my hand will move this way, or if I shorten the one on this side it'll move the other way. So our vine robot, we have
these muscles along its side, so as they inflate
they'll turn it one way, then if I deflate the
one on the other side, it'll turn the other way. - So the vine robot can
fit through tight spaces. It doesn't typically get stuck on anything and isn't bothered by sharp objects. And once you attach that
camera on the front, it's ideal for things like archeology. (group chattering)
(objects clanking) The robot was actually taken to Peru to investigate some very narrow shafts. - So we were looking at
this archeological site that was built somewhere
between 1500 and 500 BC in the Andes mountains of Peru, and it was an ancient temple that had all these underground spaces. And part of what the
archeologists were doing was trying to understand
what the spaces were for and what the people who built them were trying to do with them. So part of that was unknown, but there were these giant rooms
that they called galleries, and then there were these
small ducts or tunnels that were offshoots of these rooms, and they wanted to know
where these ducts led but they were too small
for a person to go in. So we were able to
successfully use the vine robot to explore three of the tunnels that couldn't have been
seen through other means, which was super exciting. And we got video inside the entire tunnels and gave it to the archeology team. - There's an application where I feel like this
solution is just so obvious I wonder why it didn't exist before. - Intubation is literally
the process of putting a tube into a patient. The purpose is to breathe for the patient when the patient isn't breathing. And so traditionally a highly
trained medical professional would take their laryngoscope, come above the patient, and once they see the trachea, you start to pass your tube down inside. I'm almost there, I can see the light. So if you can see right now I just got it in to the trachea. - Oh yeah.
- Right there. And it took me a couple of minutes and I was really kind of
wrenching on this patient here as if there's somebody
who's not breathing. Every second counts. - But by using a miniature
version of this vine robot, researchers are hoping to make
intubation faster and safer. - You know, somebody
like me with no training could pretty simply insert this device aimed towards the nose and... (object squealing) just like that. If you can see, we've already intubated, and all it took was a little
bit of pressurization. (man laughs) Just like that. - It almost looks like
sort of a party favor. - Yeah, right. This reminds me a lot of those inflatable kind of like play-doh
structures you see at car lots. - How does it know to
go down the right tube? - Yeah, so that's one of
the kind of cool things about soft robotics, is the robot is quite compliant. And we see that in a lot of these demos, you know, they can squish, they can bend. And so how we've designed it is that the main robot grows
down into the esophagus, and then we have this side branch that heads towards the trachea, and it's quite flexible and so it basically finds the opening. So it's a really neat example of kind of a passive intelligence, mechanical intelligence
some people call it, where it can find its path even if we don't know
exactly the shape beforehand. - Have you tried this
on a real person yet? - Not on a real person, but we've actually tried
this in a cadaver lab. And we've shown that we can move from this nice idealized version to an actual in-vivo situation and successfully intubate a patient. - There's another application which is burrowing into sand or soil. When you blow compressed air
into something like sand, it fluidizes, it becomes like a liquid, and that can allow the vine robot to grow into granular materials like sand. - If you've ever been to the beach and you try to stick like you
umbrella pole into the ground, it's fairly difficult. - And I'm trying to push that
probe down into the sand, no fluid decision. - Yeah, it feels like it
sort of gets wedged in there. - Let's now turn on the air. (air hissing) - Oh yeah. You can feel it immediately. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a lot. - So what we've done here is essentially, we just blow a jet of air
out the front of the robot and that loosens up the sand enough to reduce the force of the sand so that the robot just by tip extension can make its way through. (air hissing) - This makes vine robots an
attractive option for NASA when they look for ways
to study the surfaces of other planets. (machine roaring) Recently on Mars they tried to have a burrowing
robot but it got stuck. Could you do it better
basically with this? - Yeah, that's a good question. So the Mars InSight mission,
they have this heat probe, the idea there was to be able
to sort of hammer its way down into the core,
and then place a sensor that could detect the temperature of Mars. However, the problem they ran into there is that it turned out the
material that they put it in was more cohesive than they expected. Inside the robot something would wind up
and then pound it down, wind up and pound it down. But it turned out there
wasn't enough friction between the probe and the sand. So what was really happening was it would wind up pound
down, wind up pound down, wind up pound down. So it never actually got anywhere. The advantage of something
like this, like tip extension, is you'd have your base,
you start at the surface and you just keep extending your way down. You're not necessarily
relying on the interaction with what is surrounding
it to make it work. - What amazes me about vine robots is how a plant inspired
this simple, elegant design. It's so easy in fact that
you could build one yourself in as little as a minute. There are instructions
online that I'll link to. But from that basic design have come a huge variety of robots with different applications, from archeology to search and rescue, or intubation to space exploration. And what else can you
think of to do with it? (electronic buzzing) Hey, this video is
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Just on the intubation section - some of the information isn't entirely correct. Intubation rarely takes 'a couple of minutes', unless it is particularly difficult. It's also something that no one will ever try without previous experience. As he shows, in difficult cases it is often performed with the assistance of a video layrngoscope (camera attached to the end of the blade - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS7kQgxXC4I). Its also ideally performed under some form of vision, so you can have an idea where the tube has gone.
I can see how for 'in the field' it could be a great tool, or perhaps in emergency resuscitation scenarios. However, the chances of someone a) being present but inexperienced, b) needing to intubate someone, and c) having the equipment and a ventilator nearby for afterwards - would be slim.
I do think the tech is interesting, and I'm keen to follow their progress. Source: Airpipe doctor.
Great video
Awkward title
When the doctors inject you with the infinity tube robot: https://youtu.be/vo2X-SkAJMU?t=28
They’ve been doing this for ages to line sewers pipes with plastic. Just air pressure and plastic tubing
Oh good. Robot snakes.
That guy fucks.
“Where did you get the idea to make this?” “From my boner one time.”
Maybe this is how they built the pyramids
This video was really interesting and fun