Rise of the Soft Machines: New Tech Discovery Could Make Synthetic Companions Super Lifelike

Semi-rigid skeletons might be what we—and realistic sexbots—have been waiting for

A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently developed what might be an important step towards someday enabling tomorrow’s synthetic companions to move and even feel more organically and much less mechanically.

Designed to work with what’s commonly referred to as soft robotics, which uses liquid or gas-filled artificial muscles rather than motors and gears, the new technology is designed to maximize their effectiveness.

Talking to MIT News, Ritu Raman described it as “Like a skeleton that people can now use to turn muscle actuation into multiple degrees of freedom of motion in a very predictable way.”

The Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Engineering Design added, “We are giving roboticists a new set of rules to make powerful and precise muscle-powered robots that do interesting things.”

Small but big possibilities

While Raman and her team’s work is primarily on a lower scale—as in only a few inches across—the principle behind it might eventually lead to the creation of soft robotic, synthetic companions capable of accurately mimicking the natural fluidity of flesh-and-blood biology.

Using something akin to Raman’s micro-skeletons but far larger could also make soft robotics systems much more energy efficient, perhaps reducing the need for an external power supply or heavy, bulky internal batteries.

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But the biggest appeal of these types of sexbots undoubtedly lies in soft engineering’s smoothness, both in how it acts and how it feels—especially when compared with robots equipped with unyielding internal components.

People like us—or not?

Some soft robots more closely resemble sea creatures like octopi, following their already natural hydraulically powered body structure, than four-legged terrestrial lifeforms.    

Developed through a process dubbed evolutionary robotics, the science isn’t so much about building machine after machine as it is allowing each subsequent prototype to get better and better, steadily improving its design and mechanisms towards achieving a set task like getting from point a to point b.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have even gone a step forward, building what they refer to as a “mother robot” that, as their article puts it, “can design, build and test its own ‘children’, and then use the results to improve the performance of the next generation, without relying on computer simulation or human intervention.”

What does this have to do with lifelike synthetic companions? Using the same evolutionary approach, which gives them the freedom to make themselves more lifelike and realistic, might shave years or decades off their development.

In this way, tomorrow’s synthetic companions would have more in common with us than merely moving or feeling like we do, as they’d be using the same processes that also shaped our development.

To be or not to be—human

Here’s another question to ponder: do our synthetic companions need to resemble us? Certainly, there’s always going to be a lot that very closely resembles people like us, but why not expand our emotional and/or sexual possibilities by looking beyond the humanoid shape?

Imagine what it might be like to use soft robotics in conjunction with evolutionary robotics, this time to see what exciting new sexual devices or perhaps AI-equipped playmates emerge.

Maybe we’ll end up with something like a sensually pliant, erotically versatile octopus, each of its arms sporting a different vibrating, oscillating, pulsing appendage.

Perhaps we’d find ourselves frolicking with something akin to a dolphin-inspired merperson evolved specifically for underwater love-making?

Or what about looking up—way, way up? Could our solution to the problems of freefall sex lie in artificial assistants uniquely designed to keep us from floating apart or our banging heads on space station floors or ceilings just when things are getting good?

No more nuts, no more bolts

Soft robotics definitely seems like a much more preferable course than attempting—and too frequently failing—to use clunky motors, gears, and other less-natural mechanisms in an attempt to make robots appear and act realistically.

The only problem is that the technology remains relatively new, and it may take many years or even several decades for current research to go from small scale to the point where it can be used to give us super-lifelike synthetic companions.

But considering the sensual/sexual possibilities soft robotics might provide us in the future, I’d say it’s more than worth the wait.

Image Sources: Depositphotos