Huge Media Interest: Why octopus arms don’t stick together?

“Octopus arms have a built-in mechanism that prevents the suckers from grabbing octopus skin,” says Guy Levy (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), the lead author of the work, which appears today in Current Biology. Their article has received a huge interest from the media such as Nature, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, IBT, The Scientist, National…

STIFF-FLOP Newsletter out now!

The STIFF-FLOP consortium has now published their end-of-year newsletter which is available here. It contains the latest news items about: recent progress and achievements of the project; RoNeX – the commercialised integration platform hardware; first safety and benchmarking tests; a list of peer-reviewed papers and invited keynote speeches; STIFF-FLOP exhibitions; Advisory groups.

Professor Althoefer presents overview of octopus inspired robotic arm to members of European and UK Parliaments

During the meeting “EU support for King’s Research”, organised by Professor of Oral Immunology at King’s Charles Kelly, Professor Kaspar Althoefer (Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe), Department of Informatics) presented research currently conducted at King’s as part of EU-funded project STIFF-FLOP to Baroness Sarah Ludford (MEP for London), Simon Hughes (MP for Bermondsey and Old…

STIFF-FLOP: 1 of 5 Cool Robots funded by the EU

Prior to the festival, Robot Safari received excellent coverage in Design Week, the Daily Telegraph and Mail Online. It also received a prominent half-page listing in Time Out London. As the festival opened, further coverage appeared, including in Phys.org, Gizmag and Popular Science. The BBC published a video online with footage from the festival and…

STIFF-FLOP at the Science Museum

During the European Robotics Week, at the Science Museum in London we’ll meet swimming, flapping or crawling robots mimicking real animals. The EU-funded STIFF-FLOP project will be showing a robotic arm inspired by the softness and agility of an elephant’s trunk and by the octopus’ ability to find food by exploring small cavities in rocks.…

Distinguished Lecture: Are Robots Intelligent Yet?

Professor Althoefer explored the concept of robot intelligence and trace advancement in robotics over the last two decades. He provided his view on recent innovations that have helped to shape robots and turn them into what they are today. He presented modern methods aimed at instilling intelligence into a robot’s “brain”, covering aspects such as…

What use is a robot octopus? OCTOPUS meets STIFF-FLOP

Cecilia Laschi and Matteo Cianchetti from SSSA demonstrated how the OCTOPUS robot works and explained how it could one day be used for tasks such as repairing underwater structures like oil pipelines and ships’ hulls to performing search-and-rescue operations – venturing into places too dangerous for humans! The event was held at the Science Museum…