Squishy Robot Fingers: A Breakthrough for Underwater Science | National Geographic

We're in the northern part of the Red Sea, and the reason we're here is we're trying to test out our squishy robot fingers for the first time in a reef.

So we tested these squishy fingers in a swimming pool, and now we wanted to put them to the true test. We wanted to try them underwater in one of the richest coral environments that we have. The squishy fingers are making a robot hand, but making it out of rubber.

The idea came up when I met David, and he showed me these fantastic videos of him, you know, going underwater with his robots. But the hands that he was using were meant for oil exploration, and so they were basically just destroying everything that they touched.

And so I said, you know, well, we can make squishy fingers; it's a nice grip. You know, I think this is going to work great. This area here is one of the richest coral environments that we have.

These squishy fingers do work well on land, but do they work well under the water? We're going to find out soon. If we can grab that, that'll be interesting 'cause it very looks very fragile.

Oh, oh, nice, nice! Oh yeah, how do it grab it? You're in there! He's in squishy robot fingers!

Yes, well done! All right, yes, DNA!

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Done. From this, we could do the entire genome. We could sequence out proteins. This is all we need. It's super exciting!

I mean, we're basically in the first steps, but you could just see just the amount of potential that they have.

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