Towards Fault Diagnosis in Reconfigurable Robot

東京電機大学201

The Propulsion of Reconfigurable Modular Robots in Fluidic Environments

Reconfigurable modular robots promise to transform the way robotic systems are designed and operated. Fluidic or microgravity environments, which can be difficult or dangerous for humans to work in, are ideal domains for the use of modular systems. This thesis proposes that combining effective propulsion, large reconfiguration space and high scalability will increase the utility of modular robots. A novel concept for the propulsion of reconfigurable modular robots is developed. Termed Modular Fluidic Propulsion (MFP), this concept describes a system that propels by routing fluid though itself. This allows MFP robots to self-propel quickly and effectively in any configuration, while featuring a cubic lattice structure. A decentralized occlusion-based motion controller for the system is developed. The simplicity of the controller, which requires neither run-time memory nor computation via logic units, combined with the simple binary sensors and actuators of the robot, gives the system a high level of scalabilty. It is proven formally that 2-D MFP robots are able to complete a directed locomotion task under certain assumptions. Simulations in 3-D show that robots composed of 125 modules in a variety of configurations can complete the task. A hardware prototype that floats on the surface of water is developed. Experiments show that robots composed of four modules can complete the task in any configuration. This thesis also investigates the evo-bots, a self-reconfigurable modular system that floats in 2-D on an air table. The evo-bot system uses a stop-start propulsion mechanism to choose between moving randomly or not moving at all. This is demonstrated experimentally for the first time. In addition, the ability of the modules to detect, harvest and share energy, as well as self-assemble into simple structures, is demonstrated

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

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

Factories of the Future

Engineering; Industrial engineering; Production engineerin

Colloidal Robotics: Programming Structure and Function in Colloidal-Scale Material Through Emergence, Design and Logic

Advancements in self-assembly and top-down fabrication approaches have enabled tailoring of colloidal materials, macromolecules and polymers, and both organic and inorganic nanoparticles to build advanced functional materials. Miniature sized robots made using such materials can have huge impacts in biomedical applications such as minimally invasive surgery, tissue engineering, targeted therapy, diagnostics and single-cell manipulation. This dissertation addresses building such robotic systems that are programmable at the elemental level and are tunable at the macroscopic level. Using coarse-grained particle simulations, analytical modeling, and mechanical design, I have developed three systems to this end that correspond to programming approaches for swarm intelligence, morphological control, and mechanical computing respectively. The first two systems use colloids possessing propulsion, a.k.a. active particles, that harness environmental energy into a propulsion force and can be developed using a wide variety of materials. The first system consists of particles that trigger propulsion only when in contact with other particles. An ensemble of such particles can be tuned externally to form and switch among crystals, gels and clusters as emergent behavior. Further, these systems possess enhanced transport dynamics, which is also tunable. In the second system, the active particles are connected end-to-end in a loop. When actuated, the loops fold into programmed shapes while the internal space is available to accommodate additional components such as sensors, controller, chemicals, and communication devices. The shape and motion information is encoded in the arrangement of active particles along the loop. Besides relevance of these systems in understanding the fundamental physics of non-equilibrium systems, they can be used to develop smart materials that can sense, actuate, compute and communicate. Physical experiments using kilobots—centimeter sized robots—are performed to demonstrate the scale invariance and feasibility of the design. The third system is inspired from the development of materials that respond to external stimuli by expanding or contracting, thereby providing a transduction route that integrates sensing and actuation powered directly by the stimuli. Our work motivates building colloidal scale robots using these stimuli-responsive materials. For maximum control using global triggers, computation ability needs to be incorporated within such robots. The challenge is to design an architecture that is compact, material agnostic, stable under stochastic forces, and employs stimuli-responsive materials. The third system resolves these challenges through an architecture that computes combinatorial logic using mechanical gates. It uses linear actuation—-expansion and contraction—-as input-output signals with the additional benefits of logic circuitry being physically flexible.PHDChemical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155257/1/amayank_1.pd