Science Daily March 15, 2023 Although robots driven by rigid actuators have demonstrated agile locomotion and manipulation, most of them lack animal-like robustness against unexpected damage. Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), a class of muscle-like soft transducers, have enabled nimble aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic robotic locomotion. However, unlike muscles, DEAs suffer local dielectric breakdowns that often cause global device failure. Researchers at MIT developed DEAs that can endure more than 100 punctures while maintaining high bandwidth and power density sufficient for supporting energetically expensive locomotion such as flight. They fabricated electroluminescent DEAs for visualizing electrode connectivity under actuator damage. When the […]
Tag Archives: Aerial robots
3D printing drones work like bees to build and repair structures while flying
Science Daily September 21, 2022 An international team of researchers (UK, Germany, USA – University of Pennsylvania, Switzerland) introduced aerial additive manufacturing (Aerial-AM) that utilizes a team of aerial robots inspired by natural builders such as wasps. They developed a scalable multi-robot 3D printing and path-planning framework that enabled robot tasks and population size to be adapted to variations in print geometry throughout a building mission. To validate Aerial-AM they developed BuilDrones for depositing materials during flight and ScanDrones for measuring the print quality and integrated a generic real-time model-predictive-control scheme with the Aerial-AM robots. The manufacturing accuracy was five […]