This Unstoppable Robot Could Save Your Life

this is a robot that can grow to hundreds of times its size and it can't be stopped by adhesives or spikes although it looks kind of simple and cheap it has dozens of potential applications including one day maybe saving your life this video is sponsored by morningbrew the free daily newsletter now i made a video before about a soft truss robot and this is also a soft robot but very different in how it works and what it can do these robots can be made out of almost any material but they all follow the same basic principle powered by compressed air they grow from the tip that's good and this allows the robot to pass through tight spaces and also over sticky surfaces something like a car will get stuck to it it gets stuck in the wheels now if i do the same thing with the vine robot see the robot is able to extend it can navigate this curvy and twisted passageway effortlessly which suggests some of the applications it's well suited for now you might think spikes would be the downfall of an inflatable robot but even if it's punctured as long as you have sufficient air pressure the robot keeps going and you might be able to hear it it's actually leaking now so i'll have to turn up the pressure this by itself is not yet a robot but once we had steering a camera some sensors and maybe some intelligence as to where we're directing it then we could say it's a robot so this is sort of the backbone of a robot this is what allows us to build our type of robots so where did the idea for this device come from i had a vine in my office that was on a shelf and it was kind of out of the sunlight and over the course of like a year or so it slowly grew out this tendril out and around the edge of the shelf in towards the sunlight that's a pretty cool thing it just did right so you started thinking well is there a way you could do that robotically the solution is really elegant in its simplicity just take some airtight tubing and fold it in on itself it's kind of like a water wiggly those toys that are really hard to hold ...