A paper crane that flaps its wings without a single motor inside it sounds like a magic trick. But engineers at Princeton University have built exactly that: a soft robot, constructed entirely through ...

With their ability to shapeshift and manipulate delicate objects, soft robots could work as medical implants, deliver drugs ...

Soft robots aim to move and change shape smoothly, but they often rely on bulky motors or external systems. To overcome this, ...

The next generation of soft robots might be folding and sliding as effortlessly as living tissue, say a team of engineers who have created “magnetic muscles” with 3D printing. Filling elastic, ...

Origami isn’t just art anymore. A team of researchers at North Carolina State University has developed a new 3D printing technique that gives origami robots a life of their own, thanks to paper-thin ...

A crawler robot made with the miura-ori origami pattern. The dark sections are affixed with thin "magnetic muscles" made by co-extruding rubber polymer and ferromagnetic particles, which move the ...

A new 3-D printing technique can create paper-thin "magnetic muscles," which can be applied to origami structures to make them move. By infusing rubber-like elastomers with materials called ...

The combined mental prowess of Harvard University and MIT has yielded a special kind of self-assembling robot that folds up like origami and crawls away. The prototype, which is built almost entirely ...