Science Daily July 2, 2021 Researchers in Japan used a curved piezoelectric thin film driven at its structural resonant frequency as the main body of an insect-scale soft robot for its fast translational movements, and two electrostatic footpads were used for its swift rotational motions. These two schemes were simultaneously executed during operations through a simple two-wire connection arrangement. They achieved a high relative centripetal acceleration of 28 body length per square second which is better than those of common insects, including the cockroach. In demonstration the robot passed through a 120-centimeter-long track in a maze within 5.6 seconds. The […]
Tag Archives: Autonomous systems and robotics
Electrohydraulic arachno-bot a fascinating lightweight
EurekAlert June 16, 2021 Researchers at the University of Colorado exploited the principles of spiders’ joints to drive articulated robots without any bulky components and connectors. The Electrohydraulic Soft-actuated joints (SES) joints comprised of both rigid and softer elements can be used in many different configurations. The joints use electrostatic forces to locally pressurize a hydraulic fluid, and cause flexion of a segmented structure. SES joints with rotation angles up to 70° blocked torques up to 70 mN m, and specific torques up to 21 N m kg−1 have been demonstrated. SES joints demonstrated high speed operation, with measured roll-off […]
Scientists make highly maneuverable miniature robots controlled by magnetic fields
EurekAlert June 14, 2021 Researchers in Singapore created miniature robots by embedding magnetic microparticles into biocompatible polymers which are ‘programmed’ to execute their desired functionalities when magnetic fields are applied. They discovered the third and final principal vector of the magnetic fields, which is critical for controlling such machines. The robots have six degrees of freedom, rotate 43 times faster and they can be made with ‘soft’ materials hence replicate important mechanical qualities, ability to grip and precisely pick and place miniature objects. Other features include the remote control, ability to swim through barriers, and assemble structures, precise orientation control, […]
Slender robotic finger senses buried items
MIT News May 26, 2021 Technologies that sense the subterranean from above provide only a hazy view of submerged objects. Researchers at MIT have designed Digger Finger to meet the challenge of identifying buried objects. The Digger Finger is a slender cylinder with a beveled tip and uses a combination of blue LEDs and colored fluorescent paint. Its tactile sensing membrane is about 2 square centimeters. They ran its vibrating motor at different operating voltages, which changes the amplitude and frequency of the vibrations. They found that rapid vibrations helped “fluidize” the media, clearing jams and allowing for deeper burrowing. […]
A robot that senses hidden objects
MIT News April 1, 2021 Using RF researchers at MIT have designed, implemented, and evaluated RF-Grasp, a robotic system that can grasp fully occluded objects in unknown and unstructured environments. It can identify and locate target objects through occlusions and perform efficient exploration and complex manipulation tasks in non-line-of-sight settings. It relies on an eye-in-hand camera and batteryless RFID tags attached to objects of interest. There are two main innovations: (1) an RF-visual servoing controller that uses the RFID’s location to selectively explore the environment and plan an efficient trajectory toward an occluded target, and (2) an RFvisual deep reinforcement […]
Researchers’ algorithm designs soft robots that sense
MIT News March 22, 2021 Unlike rigid robots which operate with compact degrees of freedom, soft robots must reason about an infinite dimensional state space. This continuum state space presents significant challenges when working with a finite set of discrete sensors. Sensor location has a profound downstream impact on the richness of learned models for robotic tasks. Researchers at MIT present a novel representation for co-learning sensor placement and complex tasks. They developed a neural architecture which processes on-board sensor information to learn a salient and sparse selection of placements for optimal task performance. They evaluated their model and learning […]
Researchers introduce a new generation of tiny, agile drones
MIT News March 2, 2021 Current state-of-the-art subgram microaerial-vehicles (MAVs) are predominately powered by rigid actuators such as piezoelectric ceramics, but they have low fracture strength (120 MPa) and failure strain (0.3%). Although the existing systems can achieve a high lift-to-weight ratio, they have not demonstrated insect-like maneuvers such as somersault or rapid collision recovery. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Harvard University, Hong Kong) has developed a 665 mg aerial robot that is powered by novel dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA) which achieves high power density (1.2 kW/kg) and relatively high transduction efficiency (37%). They incorporated this soft actuator […]
This robot doesn’t need any electronics
Science Daily February 17, 2021 Pneumatically actuated soft robots are controlled with bulky and expensive electromechanical components. Researchers at UC San Diego have created a soft-legged robot using simple pneumatic circuits without any electronic components. Locomotive gaits are produced using ring oscillators composed of soft valves that generate oscillating signals analogous to biological central pattern generator neural circuits, which are acted upon by pneumatic logic components in response to sensor inputs. The robot requires only a constant source of pressurized air to power both control and actuation systems. The circuits generate walking gaits with three degrees of freedom per leg […]
Designing customized “brains” for robots
MIT News January 21, 2021 In complex situations robots often do not move quickly because perceiving stimuli and calculating a response takes a lot of computation which limits reaction time. A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Harvard University) used robomorphic computing to bridge the mismatch between a robot’s “mind” and body. Their system creates a customized hardware design to best serve a particular robot’s computing needs. The user inputs the parameters of a robot, the system translates these physical properties into mathematical matrices. These matrices contain many zero values that roughly correspond to movements that are impossible given […]
New electronic chip delivers smarter, light-powered AI
Nanowerk November 18, 2020 Realization of a single imaging unit with a combination of in‐built memory and signal processing capability is imperative to deploy efficient brain‐like vision systems. An international team of researchers (Australia, USA – Colorado State University, UC Berkeley, China) has designed a neuromorphic imaging element based on a fully light‐modulated 2D semiconductor in a simple reconfigurable phototransistor structure. This standalone device exhibits inherent characteristics that enable neuromorphic image pre‐processing and recognition. They exploited the unique photo response induced by oxidation‐related defects in 2D black phosphorus to achieve visual memory, wavelength‐selective multibit programming, and erasing functions, which allow […]