Left: the rigid top fractures on landing, while the top made of nine layers going from rigid to flexible remains intact.
Credit: Jacobs School of Engineering/UC San Diego/Harvard University
"We believe that bringing together soft and rigid materials will help
create a new generation of fast, agile robots that are more robust and
adaptable than their predecessors and can safely work side by side with
humans," said Michael Tolley, an assistant professor of mechanical
engineering at UC San Diego, and one of the paper's co-lead authors with
Nicholas Bartlett, a Ph.D. student at the Wyss Institute at Harvard,
where the bulk of the work took place. Bartlett and Tolley designed,
manufactured and tested the robot.
The idea of blending soft and hard materials into the robot's body
came from nature, Tolley said. For example, certain species of mussels
have a foot that starts out soft and then becomes rigid at the point
where it makes contact with rocks. "In nature, complexity has a very low
cost," Tolley said. "Using new manufacturing techniques like 3D
printing, we're trying to translate this to robotics."
Soft robots tend to be slow, especially when accomplishing tasks
without being tethered to power sources and other electronics, said
Tolley, who recently co-authored a research review on soft robotics for
Nature
(Rus, Tolley, v. 521, pp. 467-475). Researchers hope that their work
will allow rigid components to be better integrated within soft robots,
which will then move faster without compromising the safety of the
humans who would work with them.
In the case of the robot described in
Science, rigid layers
make for a better interface with the device's electronic brains and
power sources. The soft layers make it less vulnerable to damage when it
lands after jumping.
The robot is made of two nestled hemispheres. The top hemisphere is
like a half shell, 3D-printed in once piece, with nine different layers
of stiffness, creating a structure that goes from rubber-like
flexibility on the exterior to full rigidity near to core. Researchers
tried several versions of the design and concluded that a fully rigid
top would make for higher jumps. But a more flexible top was more likely
to survive impacts on landing, allowing the robot to be reused. They
decided to go with the more flexible design.
A challenging part of the process was designing around off-the-shelf
materials available to 3D-print the robot, Tolley said. Specs provided
by the manufacturers were not detailed enough, so he and his coauthors
printed samples to test every single material they used. The data they
collected allowed them to calculate the precise stiffness of the nine
different layers in their robot's top half. They used this information
to simulate the performance of the robot and speed up the design
process.
The bottom half of the robot is flexible and includes a small chamber
where oxygen and butane are injected before it jumps. After the gases
are ignited, this half behaves very much like a basketball that gets
inflated almost instantaneously, propelling the robot into a jump. When
the chemical charge is exhausted, the bottom hemisphere goes back to its
original shape.
The two hemispheres surround a rigid core module that houses a custom
circuit board, high-voltage power source, battery, miniature air
compressor, butane fuel cell and other components. In a series of tests,
the robot jumped two and a half feet (0.75 m) in height and half a foot
(0.15m) laterally. In experiments, the robot jumped more than 100 times
and survived an additional 35 falls from a height of almost four feet.
Tolley was a postdoctoral associate at Harvard when he did most of
the work in this paper. He was hired at UC San Diego in fall 2014. In
his lab at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, he borrows
ideas from nature to design robots composed of soft materials; robots
made by folding; and robots that self-assemble. He plans to further
explore and expand the field of biologically inspired robotics in coming
years.
Videos available here:
https://youtu.be/JhX5LxK4Gws and
https://youtu.be/XnIeshlc4oM
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from
materials provided by
University of California - San Diego. The original item was written by Ioana Patringenaru.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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