32 research outputs found

    Design, Actuation, and Functionalization of Untethered Soft Magnetic Robots with Life-Like Motions: A Review

    Full text link
    Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and can perform sophisticated tasks. Notably, soft magnetic robots exhibit unparalleled advantages among numerous soft robots (such as untethered control, rapid response, and high safety), and have made remarkable progress in small-scale manipulation tasks and biomedical applications. Despite the promising potential, soft magnetic robots are still in their infancy and require significant advancements in terms of fabrication, design principles, and functional development to be viable for real-world applications. Recent progress shows that bionics can serve as an effective tool for developing soft robots. In light of this, the review is presented with two main goals: (i) exploring how innovative bioinspired strategies can revolutionize the design and actuation of soft magnetic robots to realize various life-like motions; (ii) examining how these bionic systems could benefit practical applications in small-scale solid/liquid manipulation and therapeutic/diagnostic-related biomedical fields

    Rapid Polymer Prototyping for Low Cost and Robust Microrobots

    Get PDF
    The Rapid Microrobot Prototyping (RaMP) Process uses Loctite(R) photo-patternable polymer products and photolithography to rapidly fabricate robust, inexpensive, and compliant robots. The process is developed and examined on two size scales. On the size scale of several centimeters, two functional robots and a small gripper have been designed and demonstrated with shape memory alloy (SMA) used for actuation. The gripper is 1.2g and costs 3.21whiletheinchwormrobotis7.4gandcosts3.21 while the inchworm robot is 7.4g and costs 7.76 in small numbers. The second robot costs $14.93 in small numbers. On the sub-centimeter scale, designs and considerations for a walking microrobot fabricated with the process and its control are fully described. The design and kinematics of a thermally actuated, one degree of freedom leg for the microrobot are developed and simulated. Several of these units could be combined to rapidly build a 30 mg functional and simple walking microrobot with the ability to lift several grams

    Novel Integrated System Architecture for an Autonomous Jumping Micro-Robot

    Get PDF
    As the capability and complexity of robotic platforms continue to evolve from the macro to micro-scale, innovation of such systems is driven by the notion that a robot must be able to sense, think, and act [1]. The traditional architecture of a robotic platform consists of a structural layer upon which, actuators, controls, power, and communication modules are integrated for optimal system performance. The structural layer, for many micro-scale platforms, has commonly been implemented using a silicon die, thus leading to robotic platforms referred to as "walking chips" [2]. In this thesis, the first-ever jumping microrobotic platform is demonstrated using a hybrid integration approach to assemble on-board sensing and power directly onto a polymer chassis. The microrobot detects a change in light intensity and ignites 0.21mg of integrated nanoporous energetic silicon, resulting in 246µJ of kinetic energy and a vertical jump height of 8cm

    Multimodal locomotion ultra-thin soft robots for exploration of narrow spaces

    Get PDF
    From power plants on land to bridges over the sea, safety-critical built environments require periodic inspections for detecting issues to avoid functional discontinuities of these installations. However, navigation paths in these environments are usually challenging as they often contain difficult-to-access spaces (near-millimetre and submillimetre-high gaps) and multiple domains (solid, liquid and even aerial). In this paper, we address these challenges by developing a class of Thin Soft Robots (TS-Robot: thickness, 1.7mm) that can access narrow spaces and perform cross-domain multimodal locomotion. We adopted a dual-actuation sandwich structure with a tuneable Poisson's ratio tensioning mechanism for developing the TS-Robots driven by dielectric elastomers, providing them with two types of gaits (linear and undulating), remarkable output force (~41 times their weight) and speed (1.16 times Body Length/s and 13.06 times Body Thickness/s). Here, we demonstrated that TS-Robots can crawl, climb, swim and collaborate for transitioning between domains in environments with narrow entries
    corecore