17 research outputs found

    Sugar Beet Plot Harvester

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    SUGAR beet companies, state experiment stations, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service use replicated plots to evaluate sugar beet yields as influenced by varieties, fertilizers, water-management practices, etc. As a result, many people need some type of sugar-beet, plot-harvesting equipment. Plots frequently are up to 50 ft in length from which two to eight rows may be harvested. Harvesting sugar-beet plots by hand involves a great deal of manual labor. Beets are first undercut, then pulled and topped by hand, piled in the center of the plot, counted as they are placed in a wire basket, and lifted by hand to a scale for weighing. This method is slow and expensive

    Kirigami Makes a Soft Magnetic Sheet Crawl

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    Abstract Limbless crawling on land requires breaking symmetry of the friction with the ground and exploiting an actuation mechanism to generate propulsive forces. Here, kirigami cuts are introduced into a soft magnetic sheet that allow to achieve effective crawling of untethered soft robots upon application of a rotating magnetic field. Bidirectional locomotion is achieved under clockwise and counterclockwise rotating magnetic fields with distinct locomotion patterns and crawling speed in forward and backward propulsions. The crawling and deformation profiles of the robot are experimentally characterized and combined with detailed multiphysics numerical simulations to extract locomotion mechanisms in both directions. It is shown that by changing the shape of the cuts and orientation of the magnet the robot can be steered, and if combined with translational motion of the magnet, complex crawling paths are programed. The proposed magnetic kirigami robot offers a simple approach to developing untethered soft robots with programmable motion
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