8,937 research outputs found
SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ACTUATING SOFT ROBOTIC ACTUATORS
Systems and methods for providing a soft robot is provided. In one system , a robotic device includes a flexible body having a fluid chamber, where a portion of the flexible body includes an elastically extensible material and a portion of the flexible body is strain limiting relative to the elastically extensible material. The robotic device can further include a pressurizing inlet in fluid communication with the fluid chamber, and a pressurizing device in fluid communication with the pressurizing inlet, the pressurizing device including a reaction chamber configured to accommodate a gas producing chemical reaction for providing pressurized gas to the pressurizing inlet
Design, fabrication and control of soft robots
Conventionally, engineers have employed rigid materials to fabricate precise, predictable robotic systems, which are easily modelled as rigid members connected at discrete joints. Natural systems, however, often match or exceed the performance of robotic systems with deformable bodies. Cephalopods, for example, achieve amazing feats of manipulation and locomotion without a skeleton; even vertebrates such as humans achieve dynamic gaits by storing elastic energy in their compliant bones and soft tissues. Inspired by nature, engineers have begun to explore the design and control of soft-bodied robots composed of compliant materials. This Review discusses recent developments in the emerging field of soft robotics.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS-1226883
Advanced medical micro-robotics for early diagnosis and therapeutic interventions
Recent technological advances in micro-robotics have demonstrated their immense potential for biomedical applications. Emerging micro-robots have versatile sensing systems, flexible locomotion and dexterous manipulation capabilities that can significantly contribute to the healthcare system. Despite the appreciated and tangible benefits of medical micro-robotics, many challenges still remain. Here, we review the major challenges, current trends and significant achievements for developing versatile and intelligent micro-robotics with a focus on applications in early diagnosis and therapeutic interventions. We also consider some recent emerging micro-robotic technologies that employ synthetic biology to support a new generation of living micro-robots. We expect to inspire future development of micro-robots toward clinical translation by identifying the roadblocks that need to be overcome
Vision-Based Soft Mobile Robot Inspired by Silkworm Body and Movement Behavior
Designing an inexpensive, low-noise, safe for individual, mobile robot with an efficient vision system represents a challenge. This paper proposes a soft mobile robot inspired by the silkworm body structure and moving behavior. Two identical pneumatic artificial muscles (PAM) have been used to design the body of the robot by sewing the PAMs longitudinally. The proposed robot moves forward, left, and right in steps depending on the relative contraction ratio of the actuators. The connection between the two artificial muscles gives the steering performance at different air pressures of each PAM. A camera (eye) integrated into the proposed soft robot helps it to control its motion and direction. The silkworm soft robot detects a specific object and tracks it continuously. The proposed vision system is used to help with automatic tracking based on deep learning platforms with real-time live IR camera. The object detection platform, named, YOLOv3 is used effectively to solve the challenge of detecting high-speed tiny objects like Tennis balls. The model is trained with a dataset consisting of images of  Tennis balls. The work is simulated with Google Colab and then tested in real-time on an embedded device mated with a fast GPU called Jetson Nano development kit. The presented object follower robot is cheap, fast-tracking, and friendly to the environment. The system reaches a 99% accuracy rate during training and testing. Validation results are obtained and recorded to prove the effectiveness of this novel silkworm soft robot. The research contribution is designing and implementing a soft mobile robot with an effective vision system
System-Engineered Miniaturized Robots: From Structure to Intelligence
The development of small machines, once envisioned by Feynman decades ago, has stimulated significant research in materials science, robotics, and computer science. Over the past years, the field of miniaturized robotics has rapidly expanded with many research groups contributing to the numerous challenges inherent to this field. Smart materials have played a particularly important role as they have imparted miniaturized robots with new functionalities and distinct capabilities. However, despite all efforts and many available soft materials and innovative technologies, a fully autonomous system-engineered miniaturized robot (SEMR) of any practical relevance has not been developed yet. In this review, the foundation of SEMRs is discussed and six main areas (structure, motion, sensing, actuation, energy, and intelligence) which require particular efforts to push the frontiers of SEMRs further are identified. During the past decade, miniaturized robotic research has mainly relied on simplicity in design, and fabrication. A careful examination of current SEMRs that are physically, mechanically, and electrically engineered shows that they fall short in many ways concerning miniaturization, full-scale integration, and self-sufficiency. Some of these issues have been identified in this review. Some are inevitably yet to be explored, thus, allowing to set the stage for the next generation of intelligent, and autonomously operating SEMRs
A Survey of Technologies and Applications for Climbing Robots Locomotion and Adhesion
The interest in the development of climbing robots has grown rapidly in the last years. Climbing
robots are useful devices that can be adopted in a variety of applications, such as maintenance
and inspection in the process and construction industries. These systems are mainly
adopted in places where direct access by a human operator is very expensive, because of the
need for scaffolding, or very dangerous, due to the presence of an hostile environment. The
main motivations are to increase the operation efficiency, by eliminating the costly assembly
of scaffolding, or to protect human health and safety in hazardous tasks. Several climbing
robots have already been developed, and other are under development, for applications ranging
from cleaning to inspection of difficult to reach constructions.
A wall climbing robot should not only be light, but also have large payload, so that it may
reduce excessive adhesion forces and carry instrumentations during navigation. These machines
should be capable of travelling over different types of surfaces, with different inclinations,
such as floors, walls, or ceilings, and to walk between such surfaces (Elliot et al. (2006);
Sattar et al. (2002)). Furthermore, they should be able of adapting and reconfiguring for various
environment conditions and to be self-contained.
Up to now, considerable research was devoted to these machines and various types of experimental
models were already proposed (according to Chen et al. (2006), over 200 prototypes
aimed at such applications had been developed in the world by the year 2006). However,
we have to notice that the application of climbing robots is still limited. Apart from a couple
successful industrialized products, most are only prototypes and few of them can be found
in common use due to unsatisfactory performance in on-site tests (regarding aspects such as
their speed, cost and reliability). Chen et al. (2006) present the main design problems affecting
the system performance of climbing robots and also suggest solutions to these problems.
The major two issues in the design of wall climbing robots are their locomotion and adhesion
methods.
With respect to the locomotion type, four types are often considered: the crawler, the wheeled,
the legged and the propulsion robots. Although the crawler type is able to move relatively
faster, it is not adequate to be applied in rough environments. On the other hand, the legged
type easily copes with obstacles found in the environment, whereas generally its speed is
lower and requires complex control systems.
Regarding the adhesion to the surface, the robots should be able to produce a secure gripping
force using a light-weight mechanism. The adhesion method is generally classified into four groups: suction force, magnetic, gripping to the surface and thrust force type. Nevertheless,
recently new methods for assuring the adhesion, based in biological findings, were proposed.
The vacuum type principle is light and easy to control though it presents the problem of
supplying compressed air. An alternative, with costs in terms of weight, is the adoption of
a vacuum pump. The magnetic type principle implies heavy actuators and is used only for
ferromagnetic surfaces. The thrust force type robots make use of the forces developed by
thrusters to adhere to the surfaces, but are used in very restricted and specific applications.
Bearing these facts in mind, this chapter presents a survey of different applications and technologies
adopted for the implementation of climbing robots locomotion and adhesion to surfaces,
focusing on the new technologies that are recently being developed to fulfill these objectives.
The chapter is organized as follows. Section two presents several applications of
climbing robots. Sections three and four present the main locomotion principles, and the
main "conventional" technologies for adhering to surfaces, respectively. Section five describes
recent biological inspired technologies for robot adhesion to surfaces. Section six introduces
several new architectures for climbing robots. Finally, section seven outlines the main conclusions
Graphene-based thermopneumatic generator for on-board pressure supply of soft robots
Various fields, including medical and human interaction robots, gain
advantages from the development of bioinspired soft actuators. Many recently
developed grippers are pneumatics that require external pressure supply
systems, thereby limiting the autonomy of these robots. This necessitates the
development of scalable and efficient on-board pressure generation systems.
While conventional air compression systems are hard to miniaturize,
thermopneumatic systems that joule-heat a transducer material to generate
pressure present a promising alternative. However, the transducer materials of
previously reported thermopneumatic systems demonstrate high heat capacities
and limited surface area resulting in long response times and low operation
frequencies. This study presents a thermopneumatic pressure generator using
aerographene, a highly porous (>99.99 %) network of interconnected graphene
microtubes, as lightweight and low heat capacity transducer material. An
aerographene pressurizer module (AGPM) can pressurize a reservoir of 4.2 cm3 to
about ~140 mbar in 50 ms. Periodic operation of the AGPM for 10 s at 0.66 Hz
can further increase the pressure in the reservoir to ~360 mbar. It is
demonstrated that multiple AGPMs can be operated parallelly or in series for
improved performance. For example, three parallelly operated AGPMs can generate
pressure pulses of ~215 mbar. Connecting AGPMs in series increases the maximum
pressure achievable by the system. It is shown that three AGPMs working in
series can pressurize the reservoir to ~2000 mbar in about 2.5 min. The AGPM's
minimalistic design can be easily adapted to circuit boards, making the concept
a promising fit for the on-board pressure supply of soft robots.Comment: Author Affiliation: Functional Nanomaterials, Department of Materials
Science, Kiel University, Germany; Corresponding Authors: Dr.-Ing. Fabian
Sch\"utt ([email protected]), Prof. Dr. Rainer Adelung ([email protected]
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Using Explosions to Power a Soft Robot
This manuscript describes the use of explosions to power a soft robot—one composed solely of organic elastomers (e.g., silicones). The robot has three pneumatic actuators (pneu-nets) in a tripedal configuration. Explosion of a stoichiometric mixture of methane and oxygen within the microchannels making up the actuators produced hot gas that rapidly inflated the pneu-nets, and caused the robot to launch itself vertically from a flat surface (e.g., to jump). A soft flap embedded in the pneu-net acted as the valve of a passive exhaust system, and allowed multiple sequential actuations. The flame and temperature increase from the explosions are short-lived, and do not noticeably damage the robots over dozens of actuation cycles.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog
Chemical Power for Microscopic Robots in Capillaries
The power available to microscopic robots (nanorobots) that oxidize
bloodstream glucose while aggregated in circumferential rings on capillary
walls is evaluated with a numerical model using axial symmetry and
time-averaged release of oxygen from passing red blood cells. Robots about one
micron in size can produce up to several tens of picowatts, in steady-state, if
they fully use oxygen reaching their surface from the blood plasma. Robots with
pumps and tanks for onboard oxygen storage could collect oxygen to support
burst power demands two to three orders of magnitude larger. We evaluate
effects of oxygen depletion and local heating on surrounding tissue. These
results give the power constraints when robots rely entirely on ambient
available oxygen and identify aspects of the robot design significantly
affecting available power. More generally, our numerical model provides an
approach to evaluating robot design choices for nanomedicine treatments in and
near capillaries.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure
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