A brand new elephant-inspired robotic can do among the most stunning duties, from gently plucking a flower with its trunk to powerfully kicking a bowling ball. It’s all due to a groundbreaking design method impressed by the physique of an elephant, which mixes sturdy legs and a comfortable, versatile trunk, and makes use of just one sort of 3D printed materials. What makes this robotic particular shouldn’t be what it’s fabricated from, however the way it’s designed.
Elephant robotic demonstrates 3D printing expertise. Picture courtesy of EPFL.
The robotic was created by Professor Josie Hughes and her workforce on the CREATE Lab, a part of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering on the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The workforce additionally included postdoctoral researchers Qinghua Guan and Hung Hon Cheng, in addition to PhD pupil Benhui Dai.
As an alternative of utilizing completely different supplies for comfortable and arduous components, the workforce discovered a technique to form the within of a single materials utilizing particular inner constructions, or lattices. By altering the sample of those lattices, they’ll make the fabric act comfortable in some areas and stiff in others. This lets them construct lifelike machines that may transfer with energy and suppleness, identical to actual animals.
Lattices are like miniature constructing blocks or scaffolds inside a fabric. By altering the form and sample of those blocks, the researchers may management how stiff or comfortable every a part of the robotic could be. This new design methodology offers engineers extra management over how a robotic strikes and feels, with no need completely different supplies or difficult manufacturing.
Elephant robotic demonstrates 3D printing expertise. Picture courtesy of EPFL.
Rewriting Elephant Anatomy
In nature, animals transfer with the assistance of muscle mass, tendons, and bones that each one have completely different stiffness and energy. For instance, an elephant’s trunk is comfortable and versatile, whereas its legs are sturdy. The researchers needed to repeat this vary of motion and energy in a robotic, however with out making issues too difficult or heavy.
To do that, they invented two essential methods. The primary known as Topology Regulation (TR), which lets them progressively mix two completely different lattice shapes to create components that transition from comfortable to stiff. The second is Superposition Programming (SP), a way that stacks or rotates these lattice patterns to regulate how sturdy or versatile the fabric is in particular instructions.
Collectively, these methods enable the workforce to design robotic components with customized motion and energy, just by altering the form of the fabric’s inner construction.
The robotic elephant they constructed is a working instance of those methods. It has an extended, comfortable trunk and 4 sturdy legs.
Elephant robotic pinches a flower with its robotic trunk. Picture courtesy of EPFL.
The researchers used TR to create a easy, versatile trunk that may bend, twist, and curl. It’s constituted of lattices that slowly change form alongside the trunk’s size. This enables it to grip objects, similar to a flower, with out crushing them. The trunk is split into three sections, described as twisting, bending, and helical, that work collectively utilizing solely 4 motors and some tendons.
“This method permits the continual spatial mixing of stiffness profiles and permits for an infinite vary of blended unit cells. It’s notably fitted to replicating the construction of muscular organs like an elephant trunk,” says Dai.
In the meantime, the robotic’s legs use SP to create sturdy joints and bones. These joints can transfer in a single or two instructions, permitting the robotic to stroll, steadiness, and even kick a bowling ball. Some components of the legs are stiff and load-bearing, whereas others are softer and extra adaptive, identical to actual elephant legs.
Every part of the robotic is designed to carry out a particular movement or job. The ft, for instance, are stiffer on the entrance for assist however softer on the again, just like the cushioned heels of actual elephants, clarify the researchers of their research titled “Lattice construction musculoskeletal robots: Harnessing programmable geometric topology and anisotropy,” which was printed in Science Advances in July 2025.
Elephant robotic kicks bowling ball. Picture courtesy of EPFL.
Along with these structural improvements, the workforce additionally demonstrated how programmable lattices can assist a number of sorts of anatomical motion.
For his or her elephant mannequin, this twin programming functionality enabled the fabrication of a number of completely different tissue varieties with distinctive ranges of motion, together with a sliding aircraft joint (discovered within the small bones of the foot), a bending uniaxial joint (discovered within the knee), and a two-way bending biaxial joint (discovered within the toes). The workforce was even capable of replicate the complicated movement of the elephant’s muscular trunk by engineering separate lattice sections devoted to twisting, bending, and rotating actions, whereas sustaining easy and steady transitions between them.
Hughes says that along with modifying the froth materials or incorporating new cell shapes, their distinctive foam lattice expertise construction presents many thrilling potentialities for future robotics analysis.
“Like honeycomb, the strength-to-weight ratio of the lattice will be very excessive, enabling very light-weight and environment friendly robots. The open foam construction is well-suited for movement in fluids, and even presents potential for together with different supplies, like sensors, throughout the construction to offer additional intelligence to foams.”
One Materials, Thousands and thousands of Prospects
Though just one sort of 3D printable materials is used to make the robotic, the design potentialities are large. By altering the form and format of the interior lattices, the workforce says they’ll create over one million completely different cell varieties, and presumably extra.
Every lattice block can have a special stiffness, relying on its form or layering. Some are designed to withstand bending, whereas others are designed to twist simply, and a few can do each. This offers the robotic lifelike motion and precision, whereas nonetheless being light-weight and easy to construct.
Your entire robotic was 3D printed utilizing elastic resin and assembled with tendons and motors to regulate motion. Due to the open lattice construction, the robotic can also be lighter, sooner to print, and even capable of transfer in water.
In accordance with the research, the researchers had been impressed by how evolution has formed animals for particular actions. Snakes are versatile, cheetahs retailer power of their tendons, and human fingers are exact. The workforce believes robots needs to be inbuilt related methods, tailored to the roles they should do.
Conventional 3D printing makes use of a number of supplies or difficult strategies to make robots with completely different physique components. However these new lattice-based designs enable the whole lot to be made in a single printing course of, utilizing a single materials.
Design of the elephant robotic. Picture courtesy of EPFL.
Not Only for Elephants
For future robots, this might translate to sooner and cheaper manufacturing, and even simpler customization. In reality, this new means of constructing robots might be utilized in many fields, like healthcare, the place customized prosthetic limbs may mimic actual muscle mass and bones. In search and rescue, robots that transfer like animals might be designed to get by way of tight or harmful areas. And likewise in manufacturing, light-weight robotic arms might be made to deal with delicate or heavy objects. Mainly, these lattice constructions convey robots one step nearer to shifting and behaving like dwelling creatures.
The workforce says their strategies will be expanded to even stiffer or softer supplies sooner or later. In addition they see potential in including sensors or different clever methods contained in the lattice foam, creating robots that aren’t solely sturdy and versatile but in addition clever.
For now, the elephant robotic is proof that construction issues simply as a lot as materials. By shaping a single substance into thousands and thousands of kinds, engineers have unlocked a brand new degree of management over how robots look, transfer, and really feel. As robotics continues to evolve, one of these “programmable construction” may change the way in which machines are designed.
Subscribe to Our E-mail E-newsletter
Keep up-to-date on all the newest information from the 3D printing business and obtain data and presents from third social gathering distributors.
Add your 3D Fashions and get them printed rapidly and effectively.
