Today's use of large-scale industrial robots is enabling extraordinary achievement on the assembly line, but these robots remain isolated from the humans on the factory floor because they are very powerful, and thus dangerous to be around. In contrast, the soft robotics research community has proposed soft robots that are safe for human environments. The current state of the art enables the creation of small-scale soft robotic devices. In this article we address the gap between small-scale soft robots and the need for human-sized safe robots by introducing a new soft robotic module and multiple human-scale robot configurations based on this module. We tackle large-scale soft robots by presenting a modular and reconfigurable soft robotic platform that can be used to build fully functional and untethered meter-scale soft robots. These findings indicate that a new wave of human-scale soft robots can be an alternative to classic rigid-bodied robots in tasks and environments where humans and machines can work side by side with capabilities that include, but are not limited to, autonomous legged locomotion and grasping.

中文翻译：

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扩大软机器人：米级、模块化和可重构软机器人系统

如今，大型工业机器人的使用在装配线上取得了非凡的成就，但这些机器人仍然与工厂车间的人类隔离，因为它们非常强大，因此存在危险。相比之下，软机器人研究界提出了对人类环境安全的软机器人。当前的技术水平能够创建小型软机器人设备。在本文中，我们通过引入新的软机器人模块和基于该模块的多种人体机器人配置来解决小型软机器人与人类安全机器人需求之间的差距。我们通过展示模块化和可重新配置的软机器人平台来解决大型软机器人问题，该平台可用于构建功能齐全且不受束缚的米级软机器人。