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Thank you very much.
I just wanted to say first, thank
you for coming to hear my talk and
to let you know that there are a few
first going on right now.
So it's my first time being
at C.C.C., so I'm excited
to be here.
It's also my first time giving
a talk this late at night, so
when I got my time slot, I asked myself
the question, just how drunk will my
audience be? So you can report
back to me later about how
drunk you are.
And then the last thing that's a first
that's a little more serious is
this is my first time showing work in
progress. So I'm a little bit nervous
about that. So be gentle with me.
So when we
start talking about edible soft robotics
and this exploration of candy
as an engineered material, it
was kicked off by just this thought I had
while making cast silicone
actuators that there's an intense
similarity between the cast
silicone and gummy candies.
And it's like one of those idle thoughts
you have when you're fabricating
something.
But I was really captured
by this, like joking, not joking place.
I wanted it to be something
that is totally ridiculous that I
could also take very seriously.
And so when I was
trying to identify, like, should I do
this project or not, since I've been a
government contractor, when you
propose a project, you have to, like,
turn in these sheets about what your
project's going to be.
So I went ahead and made one about
making Candie's off robots.
So this is my quad chart.
If I were going to try to get the
government to finance my project.
But for me, it was really about
this place in the potential benefit zone
that says I see
food as the highest form of interactivity
and that that means it engages
all five of your senses.
And after you eat it, it becomes
part of you.
I couldn't think of anything more
interactive than that.
So I was that seemed like a good enough
reason to go down this pathway.
So kind of the next thing I do when I
have a project is I ask myself,
what's the history and the state of the
art? I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
I don't want to start from zero if I
don't have to.
So who is doing the work?
What are the related fields?
If you want to make a candy robot
so soft, robotics
was obviously a starting point.
Luckily, it's something I've spent a lot
of time thinking about, so I had a good
foundation there.
And then
the next one is molecular
gastronomy.
So molecular gastronomy is this idea
of using food as an art and
an experience using the tools
of science to get there.
And the thing that was interesting to
me about this field is
that all cooking is technology.
Just some technology is technology
we're used to. So, for example,
a microwave that was the cutting
edge of technology not so long ago.
And now it's just a typical tool.
So as we look at this molecular
gastronomy place, I'm interested to
see which things that seem very
far out there right now will become part
of our regular cooking.
If you look up edible robotics, the
first thing that comes up is all health
related projects.
So this, for example, is
a robot that is
made out of meat.
It's made out of sausage casings.
And its purpose is to
if you swallow a watch battery,
it can do a lot of damage to your
stomach. So this is supposed to go
through your stomach and collect the
watch battery and then flush it out of
your system.
Then the next one is kind of
the other side of the same problem.
So since you don't want to swallow a
watch battery, but you might want to
swallow a robot, they came
up with a battery that's made
from cuttlefish ink that you
can swallow it and then if
it gets digested over time.
So then to move from the health
space to the art space, which is the
other people who are making edible
robots, there's this project
called Living Food.
It's inspired by
the synthetic biology
movement. So the idea was that
they wanted to make living food
that moved and breathed and like
that would be part of the dining
experience.
Sadly, this was only a theoretical
project. So there weren't any, like
technological takeaways I could apply to
my work. But it was interesting to
consider
then. The other thing that happened is
when I was talking to people about edible
robots, people kept
pointing me back at NYC Resistor, which
is the hackerspace that I'm part of.
So I was like, oh, you know, you fell in
with the right group of hackers when your
research leads you right back to your own
door.
So the top project is called
Lady Godiva, and it's a chocolate
that's a closed circuit made with silver
edible silver foil.
So when you eat it, the chocolate moans
and you have kind of this experience.
And then below
is a Ajello piano.
So the things about these projects is
that they're dealing with sound.
But I've always been much more interested
in motion. So there wasn't a lot for me
to take away from these.
And then finally there was this robotic
big project. It was a large collaboration
through an art space and a university
and a private company.
So they were making edible robots
that moved the Rice Krispie
robot.
Is Rice Krispies covering
a cable system?
So I really like the motion
and I like the form, but I don't really
like that you have to eat around the
cables.
I was a lot more interested
in the cucumber robot because the
cucumber is strong enough that
it can use its own material to be
the cables.
So it's like this is this is where I
want to be in the robotic space.
But I didn't really want
to eat a cucumber after I had been a
robot. Like, I wasn't really drawn to
that. So that's why I was more interested
in candy.
So that's this.
That's the state of the art.
So as we go down this road, then the next
thing I like to do is consult with
experts, which is a really interesting
question. When you're working on an
emerging problem, an emerging field.
Who are the experts?
When I go down this path, I like to go
as broadly as possible, like I
might get information I might not
use.
But the further I go afield into who
I think experts are, the more surprising
information and the better synthesis
of ideas. I will get across the problem
space. So in this particular
case, I consulted
with Matthew Barguti, who is
actually my collaborator
at Super Replacer, and he is actually the
person who convinced me to get into soft
robotics at all.
And he's also the person who
told me that I had to make candy robots
once I said it, because I,
I said, well, it doesn't really fit our
soft robotics agenda.
And then he said, part of our soft
robotics agenda is to be awesome.
So you have him to thank or
blame about this project.
And you can watch his talk from
last year, C.C.C., about
soft robotics in general.
If you want to learn more about the
general field,
the next person I consulted with is
a friend of mine, Tim Rodriguez.
He's most known for being
a board game designer, but he also has
a degree in food science.
So one of the things that was
really useful to talking to him about
food science is that he took me down
the path, way of looking at
candy at the molecular level,
because it's actually all of these
very, very simple systems in
terms of the chemistry.
And he had some great insights
to about the relationship between
why Candy is sometimes not a very
strong material where and why vegetables
are strong.
So that's something that will come up
again a little later.
And then my friend Liz Hara, she
is a professional puppet builder.
I have worked with her at the Jim
Henson Company and other places,
and she is also an extreme candy
enthusiast.
She has eaten every kind of candy
that is mass produced in America, which
is quite a feat.
And then one of the other things that's
been really wonderful about talking
to her is because she made edible puppets
once. So she gave me this fabulous
insight. I can tell you stabbing licorice
into a hot dog does not make a durable
puppet. This is the voice
of experience.
And then the other thing that's been so
great about working with her is that
she's very enthusiastic about
the candy actuator space.
So she's been texting me more information
even while I've been here.
So now that I've talked to the experts,
I needed to balance my project.
I needed to decide what the evaluation
criteria was, whether or not
I was succeeding at making a soft robot.
In this particular case,
I decided you have to be able
to eat the whole robot up to the computer
control. As I said before, I'm not
really a fan of the like eating around
cables.
Also, it needs to be easy to reproduce.
The primary reason that I'm doing
this project, other than to be awesome,
is to make a how to to put into
a book about soft robotics that I'm
writing.
And so what I decided
to reproduce looked like was
that it could
use special specialty ingredients.
You could have to go far afield to find
the right things, but you shouldn't have
to buy specialty equipment in order
to do this project, because
I don't want people filling up their
lives with all of these things.
They're only going to use once or
twice to make a candy robot.
The other was that it had to be not too
fussy to make.
When I talk about fuzzy to make, I don't
know if any of you have ever made a
meringue, but it's
incredibly sensitive to the humidity
and like you have to adjust everything
very carefully.
So I wanted the robot to
be something that it wouldn't be
temperature or weather dependent.
I wanted it to elicit an emotional
response that was strong.
And for me, when you deal with candy, you
either get two directions.
You get like this joyful space, like this
fun and happy space, or you get something
that's like really gross like snot
or like
those jelly beans that tastes like vomit.
So those were the two most
exciting places for me in the edible
robotics place.
And then I wanted there to be a baseline
fit flavor standard, so
I didn't want it just to be technically
edible. So a lot of people I talked to
about this were like, well, you can eat
fabric or you can eat paper.
And I was like, I think that's really not
in the spirit of the project.
Like, I think that there has to be
a baseline deliciousness
that makes this.
An appealing thing, and then
it needs to be durable enough to make the
day before, I don't like the
pressure of like having to perform,
making something to the last minute right
before I serve it to someone,
especially for something as complicated
as a robot.
So I wanted you to be able to make it the
day before and then serve it.
And then also,
there was no need for long term
stability, though, because once you get
into the place where you're making a food
actuator, long term
storage just sounds like dusty,
dirty handled by a lot of people,
which then went away from kind of
the the the delightful
edible component I was looking for.
So those are the specs that I'm
going to measure success against.
So now,
since I got into technology
kind of through being a fabricator
and through my experience working
with materials and like
direct relationship with the material
world, it makes the most sense
to me to spend time with the
materials and to touch the materials and
to experience what they do.
And aside from it being my comfort
zone. The other thing I wanted to
bring to the process
was that I have seen many,
many people build projects out of
inappropriate materials.
And you can see that they're spending a
lot of time over and over again trying
to make something do.
An object that it cannot achieve,
so because I don't know anything about
Candy as a engineering
material, before I started, I
needed to spend time with the materials
to know what's appropriate.
Use cases were
so.
First thing I did was start acquiring
some materials, so Kallu
stands the place to buy hydro
colloids in New York City.
I'm going to say hydro quite a
lot.
That's what makes a gummy candy, a gummy
candy.
So just so we have a definition to start
with, a hydro keloid is
a stable suspension of hydrophilic
molecules.
So most of them
are sugars, but some of them are
proteins. So, for example, gelatins are
proteins and there are hydrochloride.
So moving on, I acquired
a bunch of heidrich.
Now, what I didn't realize when I started
down this pathway
gelling of hydro colloids
is a foundational problem of molecular
gastronomy. I thought that I was going
into a space where everything was going
to be mostly solved.
But what I found instead is in
this book, this is 22
different options for gelling agents.
So there's a lot
of ways to achieve this outcome.
And I'm actually going to read directly a
quote from the book because it made me
laugh.
Unfortunately, relatively
little theory exists that can help cookes
know which gelling agents or coagulants
will have synergistic effects.
We can recommend several good
combinations based on trial and error
in our kitchen and others,
but more information would be helpful.
There are many possibilities out there
waiting, awaiting discovery.
Now, the reason why this quote is funny
to me is because I work in soft robotics
and essentially if you swap out Kitchin
for lab and like one other noun,
it's exactly what you would read in an
academic paper.
So I started on
my hydrograph flight path by doing
pectin, now, pectin was a good
case because it actually illustrated
what doesn't work.
It's a Heidrich Cleide that
is made of monomers that are very dense
and very small, and they only have
a single point where they joined to the
other ones.
And because there is no motion
within the monomer
and then there's the only the single
point of connection.
This makes a gel that's incredibly
brittle and breaks apart under
any kind of snapping force.
So it's totally inappropriate for
soft robots, but it is very
good for learning about hydrate quoits.
Number two, iteration or number two
material exploration was
I burned the gelatin.
This was horrible.
It smelled awful.
And it was also really interesting
because it reminded me that I was working
with a protein. I think that we don't
really think about how the materials
within candy are things that
are kind of surprising if you if you
pick it apart a little more.
So I made
my third version, my third batch
was too much gelatin,
and this was yet another reminder that I
was working with an animal product
because the outcome looked and smelled
like and taste like skin,
which is not a desirable outcome.
And Candy.
So now we get to some slightly
more successful gels.
So this is a Jello brand
gelatin.
It was a good compromise between flavor
and ease of handling because it already
had sugar. It already had
some some measurements done for
you. But this is an example
of an elastic hydrochloride.
So what happens is
collagen is a
tri helix form.
So it's inherently very, very stretchy.
As you can imagine, the space between
the three three components of the tri
helix that stretch out
well, when you make gelatin, it breaks
into these single strands.
So they're all like a free
for the floating spiral.
As you treat the
as you treat the material, the gelatin,
as you heat it up to a certain point, you
actually start making these bonds again
and you start getting tri helix
sometimes, but not all of the time.
So you end up with this combination where
the tri helical parts are very
stretchy. Still, all of the free
floating ends that didn't make bonds
end up in this tangled mess
that a chemist told me is a lot
like spaghetti.
So one spaghetti is really hot and moist.
It slides out and you can pull
some strands away, but as soon
as it gets cold, that tangled mess is
stuck together and becomes a very,
very solid thing.
And so that relationship between
the tangled mess and the tri helix
is what gives gummies.
They're like very, very.
Signature texture.
So this is an experiment
that I made out of Gelin Gellin
is a different kind of hydrolyzed it's a
plant based and actually is a
bacteria that grows on the bottom of lily
pads in nature, which is pretty
interesting.
Now, the great thing about Gellin is that
it makes this like extremely
stretchy material,
but at the same time it's very tender and
soft.
And when they were talking about like
synergies between Heidrick Colditz,
it's often combined with carrageenan to
give it a stiffness.
But the thing that's interesting about
mixing hydrochloride is
that you don't get an average between
the two. When you start mixing them, you
get entirely new behaviors that
aren't reflected by the individual.
So that is a future experiment.
So I went back to the Jello brand gelatin
recipe and then I was starting
to be like, OK, this is this is working
a little bit. So I'm going to go ahead
and cast it in a soft, robotic mold.
So this is dusted with
cornstarch.
Traditional gummies are actually made
in cornstarch molds.
They press metal shapes
into corn starch and then pour the
pour the gel directly into it.
This is not food safe, so please
don't do this in the future.
So when I do future robots, I'm probably
going to make silicone mold.
But this mold was just one that I
3D printed.
So then my seventh
experiment, making gelatin based
making hydrochloride by stealth, was
I used what they called a Haribo recipe.
I don't know if that's how you pronounce
it here, but the thing
that was really interesting about this
one was that they sub out
regular white sugar for other sugars.
You use glycol and submittal
because it changes the moisture
amounts in the mixture and you can
eliminate some of the water when you
switch the sugar source.
So unsurprisingly, this one
was the most delicious one that I made.
And I think part of that was
that it has added acid.
So you can use citric acid or you can use
I can't remember the name of the other
acid, but a lot of different
food acids can be used, but it really
improves the flavor profile of your
candy.
Oops. So
in the future, I have some plans for
testing the assessment
of these gels.
And I didn't even get to it because
the gel problem was so much deeper than
I anticipated.
So I'm planning to test
the diameter, the elasticity, the
flexibility and the durability of
all my future iterations
of the candy making.
So in the store about material side, I
went to economy candy.
I bought a lot of different candy.
I spent way too much money on candy.
Also, I learned, don't eat your mistakes
if you start working.
And candy robotics.
I ate three iterations and
then I didn't feel so well.
So I'm not a purist when it comes to soft
robotics. I also love hybrid robots.
So I did some tests
where I drilled into chalky candies
to see whether or not they could be
spacer components
which successful they were totally
clean and had durable holes.
And I could drill in a variety of sizes
inspired by the octopus, which
is a soft
robot that runs a liquid across.
I think it's a platinum plate and that
that creates gas.
I was like, oh, maybe I can make an
explosive gas actuator
by using pop rocks, but you can tell that
it does not have any explosive action
at all. Nothing happened.
Just a very slow fizzle.
So if I want to make a chemical
reaction robot, I'll probably go to
Mentos and Diet Coke because.
The Internet has really well documented
that that works well.
Another thing I tried was buying
pre purchased candy and then heating
them. So one of the things that's
interesting about this set of
hydrochloride is that I'm exploring is
that they are not a single state
like one time reactions.
They actually can revert.
So you can keep them up and cool them
down and it will cost the same chemical
reaction set over and over again.
So actually, there's lots of do overs if
you're working and gummies.
And so this these ones were microwaved.
And I thought that would be an
interesting option if people didn't want
to make candy robots from scratch
and then fruit leather.
I was inspired by the fact that there's
a lot of soft robots that are made out
of airtight fabric that doesn't flex
but just holds air.
So this is me using a compressor
to pump air into
some fruit leather.
And it also made a pretty good seal
just with its own stickiness, which was a
surprise.
So I said something before
about vegetable matter, a lot
of the things I used for pulling force
that were made of candy didn't
hold up to the amount of force I needed
to cause the situation.
So I tried dried mangoes,
which are excellent.
You can't they they fit the taste
profile. They go well with candy,
but you can tie it in knots, you can find
things off.
You can use them as cable control's
excellent material for the space.
And then also there's these licorice
vines that are hollow so
you can pull things through them.
They're also airtight, so you
can use them as tubing, so
if you want to make a pneumatic system.
So I'm going to move
on now to my next plan
in this process was that I was going to
do an iteration of a wide field.
So usually what I do is
I take all of my promising materials
and I'll do a single iteration of each of
the problem, promising materials.
But the thing is that in this case,
I ran out of time, like the
Dell problem was so much bigger than I
ever thought it would be that I
only got through one iteration.
So I wanted to let you know that right
now. So in addition to iterating
on all the promising materials, I wanted
to do one iteration of each control
method that is popular in soft robotics.
So that's cable controlled pneumatic
hydraulic and chemical reaction.
The only one I got through is cable
controlled, but this is my first
iteration of a cable controlled
robot made up candy.
So it kind
of works,
and then when I do my
first iterations, I have to go back and
assess what worked and didn't work.
And one of the things that I found about
a cable controlled candy robot
was I wanted a lubricant,
so I tried oil.
Oil was terrible.
It was a solvent. It worked a lot like
water. Everything started breaking down
and getting stickier.
And then I was like, oops, of course,
sugar dissolves in moisture.
Should have thought of that.
But sometimes when you switch from one
domain to the next, the things you know
don't transfer with it.
I tried cornstarch because I was like,
dry lubricant seems the way to go.
It got a little gummy as it rolled.
So it was good short term lubricant,
but it you couldn't
have high cycles with confectioner's
sugar. It was the most promising.
So confectioners sugar is a mixture of
very, very fine sugar with cornstarch.
The second iteration would be a narrowed
field based on my first set of
iterations, TBD.
And the same thing is true to getting
the final soft robot.
So repeat iterations till your specs are
met. No excess and
iterate yes, you're done
TBD.
So the thing, though, about
this whole conversation is
I really wanted
to take the risk of showing work in
progress and showing unfinished work.
And the reason why I wanted to show
unfinished work is because it
incentivized me to show
you my failures.
I think that innovators spend a lot of
time talking about how we're willing to
fail. But what happens is you either get
all the way to the end or you give up on
the project and there's not any air time
for whether or not you succeed, what your
failures were and.
And so and the other
thing I was interested in,
why I wanted to give this talk is because
I'm talking about candy robots today,
but my deeper interest is
in systems and processes
and particularly how a robust process
can give you a framework in
which you can succeed on something that's
never been done before.
And also how being in a good
process means when you get stuck, there's
a way to correct for that.
There's a way to get unstuck for me in
this process. When I get stuck, I can
always go back to an expert or find a new
expert. And it means that I never
hit a bottleneck where I stop innovating.
So hopefully people will
think about processes for working on
emerging technologies that are from their
toolkit. I'd love to hear about that or
use this one to work on your own
problems.
Some final thoughts.
I think design thinking and other
processes yield effective pathways
through the unknown.
I think people in general should work on
emerging fields wherever you find them.
It's where you find the most exciting
problems and the most interesting
opportunities.
And then in general, I want people to
reach out. If you want to share or
collaborate about edible robotics,
I could use more help in chemistry
control systems for SOF actuators
is a is a juicy problem.
Or you tell me maybe you're an expert in
something related to this that I haven't
even thought of yet.
And also, please reach out if you want to
talk process.
So this is me and where
you can find me on the Internet.
And if you want to talk to me about the
other things she introduced me before,
I like to talk about soft robotics,
spacesuits, costumes and puppets.
So thank you.
Thank you.