Robotics Technology Center

JSEL Enables IRobot’s Military Bot

A palm-sized mobile robot was developed by IRobot primarily for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Army Research Offices' vision to create the flexible military bot.

ChemBot was the name given to the soft morphing robot that is able to traverse complex terrains and navigate through small openings, such as tiny wall cracks, during scouting and search-and-rescue operations. It gets around by way of a process called "jamming," a mechanism by which a particular material can transition from a semiliquid to a solid state with only a slight change in volume.

The JSEL, or jamming skin enable locomotion takes advantage of a technology for a soft-mobile robot such as in ChemBot's case. Here, a hyper-elastic skin is constructed with multiple cellular compartments. The center is filled with an incompressible fluid and a biometric cable. Jamming is occurs when the center actuator is inflated with air. The skin attempts to equalize the pressure differential by constricting the particles, which shift slightly to fill the void left by the evacuated air. As a result, the soft, morphing robot moves around like a gummy, horrifying blob.