Science Daily September 13, 2023 Researchers at the University of Washington designed origami battery-free microfliers using bistable leaf-out structures and found that a simple change in the shape of the origami structures caused two dramatically different falling behaviors. When unfolded and flat, the microfliers exhibited a tumbling behavior that increased lateral displacement in the wind. When folded inward, their orientation was stabilized, resulting in a downward descent that was less influenced by wind. To electronically transition between these two shapes, they designed a low-power electromagnetic actuator that produced peak forces of up to 200 millinewtons within 25 milliseconds while powered […]
Tag Archives: Robotics
Researchers build bee robot that can twist
Science Daily May 23, 2023 A team of researchers in the US (UCLA, industries, Washington State University) has developed a an insect-scale flying robot, Bee ++, driven by four independently actuated flapping wings using new method for synthesizing and implementing high-performance six-degree-of-freedom (6 -DOF) flight controllers. Each wing of the Bee ++ was installed with a preset orientation enabling reliable roll, pitch, and yaw torque generation, and a Lyapunov-based nonlinear control architecture that enabled closed-loop position and attitude regulation and tracking. The control algorithms stabilize position and attitude by independently varying the wing stroke amplitudes of the four flapping wings. […]
This Incredible Tiny Robot Can Locate And Capture Individual Cells
Science Alert April 8, 2023 While dielectrophoretic (DEP)-based cargo manipulation can be achieved at high-solution conductivity, electrical propulsion of these micromotors becomes ineffective at solution conductivities. Researchers in Israel found that combination of a rotating magnetic field and electric field results in enhanced micromotor mobility and steering control through tuning of the electric field frequency. They demonstrated the micromotor’s ability of identifying apoptotic cell among viable and necrotic cells based on their dielectrophoretic difference. This enabled analysis of apoptotic status in the single-cell samples for drug discovery, cell therapeutics, and immunotherapy. According to the researcher’s hybrid micromotor approach for label-free […]
A robot learns to imagine itself
Science Daily July 13, 2022 Internal computational models allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions without trying them out in physical reality. Recent progress in fully data-driven self-modeling has enabled machines to learn their own forward kinematics directly from task-agnostic interaction data. However, forward kinematic models can only predict limited aspects of the morphology, such as the position of end effectors or velocity of joints and masses. A key challenge is to model the entire morphology and kinematics without prior knowledge of what aspects of the morphology will be relevant to future tasks. Researchers at Columbia University […]
Robot overcomes uncertainty to retrieve buried objects
MIT News June 28, 2022 Researchers at MIT have built a prototype of a robotic system for RF-Visual mechanical search that leverages the mere existence of an RF-tagged item in the pile to benefit both tagged and untagged items. The two key innovations. RF-Visual Mapping, a technique that identifies and locates RF-tagged items in a pile and uses this information to construct an RF-Visual occupancy distribution map. The second innovation is RF-Visual Extraction, a policy formulated as an optimization problem that minimizes the number of actions required to extract the target object. In over 180 real-world experimental trials FuseBot outperformed […]
Self-healing materials for robotics made from ‘jelly’ and salt
Science Daily February 18, 2022 There are numerous challenges in the deployment of wearable devices with soft sensing technologies due to their poor resilience, high energy consumption, and omnidirectional strain responsivity. Researchers in the UK have developed a versatile ionic gelatin-glycerol hydrogel for soft sensing applications. The device is inexpensive and easy to manufacture, self-healable at room temperature, can undergo strains of up to 454%, presents stability over long periods of time, and is biocompatible and biodegradable. The material is ideal for strain sensing applications, with a linear correlation coefficient R2 = 0.9971 and a pressure-insensitive conduction mechanism. The experimental results show […]
Integrating microchips for electronic skin
Science Daily January 22, 2020 To closely replicate natural skin, it is necessary to interconnect a large number of individual sensors. An international team of researchers (Japan, Germany) developed a sensor system that consists of a 2 x 4 array of magnetic sensors, an organic bootstrap shift register, required for controlling the sensor matrix, and organic signal amplifiers. All electronic components are based on organic thin-film transistors and are integrated within a single platform. The researchers demonstrated that the system has a high magnetic sensitivity and can acquire the two-dimensional magnetic field distribution in real time and very robust against […]
Robots to autocomplete Soldier tasks
Science Daily April 4, 2019 The Army envisions a future battlefield wrought with teams of Soldiers and autonomous systems. As part of this future vision, the Army is looking to create technologies that can predict states and behaviors of the individual to create a more optimized team. A team of researchers in the US (ARL, Columbia University, SUNY Buffalo, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Santa Barbara) is looking at ways the dynamics and architecture of the human brain may be coordinated to predict such behaviors and consequently optimize team performance. While this research focuses on a single person, […]
Engineers create a robot that can ‘imagine’ itself
Science Daily January 30, 2019 Researchers at Columbia University have created a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. After a brief period of “babbling,” and within about a day of intensive computing, the robot creates a self-simulation and uses that self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body. Using a four-degree-of-freedom articulated robotic arm, initially the robot moved randomly and collected approximately one thousand trajectories. Then used deep learning to create a self-model. […]
An insect-inspired drone deforms upon impact
Science Daily July 26, 2018 An international team of researchers (Switzerland, Japan) has developed an origami structure which consists of a prestretched elastomeric membrane, akin to the soft resilin joints of insect wings, sandwiched between rigid tiles, akin to the rigid cuticles of insect wings. The dual-stiffness properties of the structure are validated by using the origami as an element of a quadcopter frame that can withstand aerodynamic forces within its flight envelope but softens during collisions to avoid permanent damage… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE