All we ever see an earthworm. These beings are dragged along the ground alternately compressing and relaxing the muscles that have over their bodies, moving slowly with each wave of contractions. Well, this strange but efficient propulsion system has been imitated by a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University, who have built a robot called Meshworm that not only moves like a worm, but is able to "survive" with a hammer or footprints. Part of the project funding comes from the ubiquitous agency DARPA.

The researchers in robotics often tend to "brainstorm" in (or blatantly copied) nature. We've seen robots with legs fast as a cheetah, flying and even some can swim like a fish. However, there is still room for surprise. In the last hours, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT for its acronym in English) has issued a press release in which you can see a job that its engineers have made together scientists from Harvard University and the University Seoul National. This is the robot called Meshworm whose main feature is to mimic the way it moves and shifts an earthworm.

Earthworms crawl along the ground through a mechanism that basically boils down to alternately compress and stretch muscles that have over their bodies, moving slowly with each sequence of contractions. The snails and sea cucumbers also used to move a similar mechanism, called peristalsis, and the food moves through the inside of our body like ripples through our gastrointestinal tract. The robot Meshworm, composed almost entirely of soft materials, it is also very strong. As you can see in the video, is capable of withstanding a person will pass over or blows with a hammer.

Sangbae Kim, Esther and Harold E. Edgerton, project managers, say a robot "soft and flexible as it can be useful for traversing rough terrain or made by small cracks." The "muscles" of the robot is constructed with a wire of an alloy of nickel and titanium that has a certain shape memory, able to expand or contract when their temperature varies. Winding a wire around a tube these plain, form "muscle rings" like those with live worms because when they get a small stream segments wire mesh tube pressure, they deform and drive robot forward. The results of this work were presented at society through an article published in the journal IEEE / ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, explaining that it could be the first of a new generation of robots, soft and lightweight, ideal for exploring hard to reach spaces.



Kim explains that earthworms possess two main muscle groups: circular muscle fibers surrounding the tube-shaped body of the worm, and other longitudinal muscle fibers that run along it. The two groups of muscles work together so that the worm can move slowly. The research team set out to design a similar system, using "body" built a long tube with a heat seal polymer mesh. It is placed on the "muscles" nickel-titanium, thanks to the current provided by a computerized system, were able to move the robot. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Pentagon agency that is always behind any project that could have a military application, provided some of the funds used to create the Meshworm.

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