Soft Robotics
Gone are the days when robots were only metal and electricity. The time when war machines were the only future seemed possible and movies like terminator scarred the future of robotics for good.
Today however things are very different. Robotics has grown, and it continues to grow and explore areas which earlier seemed beyond its reach.
In the past metal and rigid structure robots found their application in industries, where they performed a task repeatedly and with great precision but when the same machine was put in conditions which were not precisely mapped and programmed the robot failed. The failure was due to the absence of what we call as embodied intelligence.
Embodied Intelligence or cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism
The theory suggests that the ability of humans to perform and adapt to a certain environment is not only due to its brain mapping the area perfectly but also because the human body can change and act according to the environment so that the task at hand becomes easier for the brain to comprehend. What happens in hard structured robots is that their bodies fail to interact with nature and hence they fail to adjust to it.
