Abstract
Pity the poor insect that wanders onto a Venus flytrap. Just a couple false steps into the carnivorous plant’s trigger hairs, and the leaves snap shut, dooming the bug. Inspired by the Venus flytrap’s ability to distinguish between insects and other stray bits of matter, Tampere University of Technology scientists Arri Priimagi, Hao Zeng, and Owies M. Wani have created a soft robot that acts with the same sort of autonomy. Their optical flytrap distinguishes between objects that reflect or scatter light and those that do not before grabbing the reflective ones. “It’s very difficult in soft robotics to develop systems that make decisions by themselves,” says Priimagi, who led the research team. Most soft robots, he says, don’t react to their environment but instead require some sort of external activation. His team’s solution was to incorporate an optical fiber into a liquid crystalline elastomer. When the light strikes a
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