| "Often the only available points of entry are small openings in buildings, walls, under doors, etc. In these cases, a robot must be soft enough to squeeze or traverse through small openings, yet large enough to carry an operationally meaningful payload," DARPA stated in a solicitation last week. "ChemBots represent the convergence of soft materials chemistry and robotics to create a fundamentally new class of soft meso-scale robots." DARPA is looking for robot prototypes about the size of a softball that travel a distance of 5 meters at a quarter of a meter per minute, collapse to a tenth of its size and then squeeze through a 1 centimeter opening and reconstitute to its original shape in 15 seconds. White papers on proposals are due May 3, 2007 and full proposals are due July 2, 2007. |