Rethinking how robots move: Light and AI drive precise motion in soft robotic arm - Robohub

Source: robohub
Published: 10/1/2025
To read the full content, please visit the original article.
Read original articleResearchers at Rice University have developed a novel soft robotic arm that can perform complex tasks such as navigating obstacles or hitting a ball, controlled remotely by laser beams without any onboard electronics or wiring. The arm is made from azobenzene liquid crystal elastomer, a polymer that responds to light by shrinking under blue laser illumination and relaxing in the dark, enabling rapid and reversible shape changes. This material’s fast relaxation time and responsiveness to safer, longer wavelengths of light allow real-time, reconfigurable control, a significant improvement over previous light-sensitive materials that required harmful UV light or slow reset times.
The robotic system integrates a spatial light modulator to split a single laser into multiple adjustable beamlets, each targeting different parts of the arm to induce bending or contraction with high precision, akin to the flexible tentacles of an octopus. A neural network was trained to predict the necessary light patterns to achieve specific movements, simplifying the control of the arm and enabling virtually infinite degrees of freedom beyond traditional robots with fixed joints
Tags
roboticssoft-roboticssmart-materialsAI-controllight-responsive-materialsmachine-learningazobenzene-elastomer