Imagine a robot that moves as naturally as an animal. Engineers at EPFL have developed a programmable foam lattice that blends soft and rigid elements, allowing robots to perform intricate moves like a twisting trunk and coordinated limbs.
Housed in EPFL’s Computational Robot Design and Fabrication Lab (CREATE) under Josie Hughes, this innovation breaks away from conventional mechanical designs. By dividing a simple foam into individual cells that can change shape and orientation, the team has created a versatile mechanical core. Postdoctoral researcher Qinghua Guan explained, “We used our programmable lattice technique to build a musculoskeletal-inspired elephant robot with a soft trunk that can twist, bend and rotate, as well as more rigid hip, knee, and foot joints.”
The design leverages two main cell types—body-centered cubic (BCC) and X-cube—each offering its own balance of stiffness and deformation. By seamlessly blending these cells across the robot’s structure, much like the way muscles transition into tendons and bones, the researchers achieved smooth and natural movements. Ph.D. candidate Benhui Dai noted that by rotating, shifting, or overlaying cells, they unlocked millions of geometric configurations, with a single cube generating about four million combinations using four cells, and even more with five.
This technical flexibility enabled the creation of various joint types—from sliding foot joints to bending knees and complex biaxial toe joints—giving the robotic elephant a truly lifelike mobility. Moreover, the foam’s open structure not only supports advanced locomotion but also paves the way for integrating other materials, such as sensors, to enhance the robot’s overall intelligence.
If you’ve ever struggled with balancing agility and strength in robotics, this foam lattice approach offers a fresh and practical solution. It demonstrates that by rethinking material design, we can develop robots that are both lightweight and efficient, ready to tackle a range of real-world challenges.
