Claire chatted to Simona Aracri from National Research Council of Italy about innovative robot designs for oceanography and environmental monitoring.

Simona Aracri is a researcher in the Institute of Marine Engineering at the National Research Council of Italy. Previously, she was a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh, working on the award winning project ORCA Hub and focusing on offshore robotic sensors. Her research uses innovative sensors and robotic platforms to push the boundaries of observational oceanography and environmental monitoring. She has spent more than 6 months at sea on oceanographic sampling campaigns, in the Mediterranean Sea, Pacific Ocean and the North Sea.

Muscles are remarkably effective systems for generating controlled force, and engineers developing hardware for robots or prosthetics have long struggled to create analogs that can approach their unique combination of strength, rapid response, scalability, and control. But now, researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Politecnico di Bari in Italy have developed artificial muscle fibers that come closer to matching many of these qualities.

With their ability to shapeshift and manipulate delicate objects, soft robots could work as medical implants, deliver drugs inside the body and help explore dangerous environments. But the squishy machines are often limited by rigid mechanical parts or external systems that provide power or help them move.