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Soft assistive robotic wearables get a boost from rapid design tool

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Scientists created a new design and fabrication tool for soft pneumatic actuators with integrated sensing, which can power personalized healthcare, smart homes, and gaming.

Soft, pneumatic actuators might not be a phrase that comes up in daily conversations, but more likely than not you might have benefited from their utility. The devices use compressed air to power motion, and with sensing capabilities, they’ve proven to be a critical backbone in a variety of applications such as assistive wearables, robotics, and rehabilitative technologies.

But there’s a bit of a bottleneck in creating the little dynamic devices that have advantages like high response rates and power to input ratios. They require a manual design and fabrication pipeline, which translates to a lot of trial and error cycles to actually test and see whether the designs will work. [Read more…] about Soft assistive robotic wearables get a boost from rapid design tool

New sensor that mimics automatic human reaction to heat could pave the way for ‘soft robots of the future’

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A new robotic sensor that mimics the automatic human reaction to heat is being hailed as a world first.

The device has been built by a team of experts from Liverpool Hope University, who say it’s the first sensor that can trigger this “sensory impulse” that the robotics community has yet seen.

The findings have been published in IEEE Xplore last December 15, 2021 as an early-access article and published this month in the IEEE Sensors Journal. [Read more…] about New sensor that mimics automatic human reaction to heat could pave the way for ‘soft robots of the future’

New soft robot morphs from a ground to air vehicle using liquid metal

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Imagine a small autonomous vehicle that could drive over land, stop, and flatten itself into a quadcopter. The rotors start spinning, and the vehicle flies away.

Looking at it more closely, what do you think you would see? What mechanisms have caused it to morph from a land vehicle into a flying quadcopter? You might imagine gears and belts, perhaps a series of tiny servo motors that pulled all its pieces into place.

If this mechanism was designed by a team at Virginia Tech led by Michael Bartlett, assistant professor in mechanical engineering, you would see a new approach for shape changing at the material level. [Read more…] about New soft robot morphs from a ground to air vehicle using liquid metal

Robot performs laparoscopic surgery without guiding hand of a human

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By Catherine Graham, Johns Hopkins University

In four experiments on pig tissues, the robot excelled at suturing two ends of intestine – one of the most intricate and delicate tasks in abdominal surgery

A robot has performed laparoscopic surgery – also known as keyhole surgery or minimally invasive surgery – on the soft tissue of a pig without the guiding hand of a human.

The people responsible say this is “a significant step toward fully automated surgery on humans”.

Designed by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, is described today in Science Robotics.

Senior author Axel Krieger, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering, says: “Our findings show that we can automate one of the most intricate and delicate tasks in surgery: the reconnection of two ends of an intestine. [Read more…] about Robot performs laparoscopic surgery without guiding hand of a human

A system for designing and training intelligent soft robots

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‘Evolution Gym’ is a large-scale benchmark for co-optimizing the design and control of soft robots that takes inspiration from nature and evolutionary processes

Let’s say you wanted to build the world’s best stair-climbing robot. You’d need to optimize for both the brain and the body, perhaps by giving the bot some high-tech legs and feet, coupled with a powerful algorithm to help enable the climb.

Although design of the physical body and its brain, the “control”, are key ingredients to letting the robot move, existing benchmark environments favor only the latter. Co-optimizing for both elements is hard – it takes a lot of time to train various robot simulations to do different things, even without the design element.

Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), aimed to fill the gap by designing “Evolution Gym”, a large-scale testing system for co-optimizing the design and control of soft robots, taking inspiration from nature and evolutionary processes. [Read more…] about A system for designing and training intelligent soft robots

MIT unveils robot that can brush your hair

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MIT has unveiled a robot that can brush your hair for you as you can’t be bothered because this is the 10,000th lockdown and no one has seen you for decades and your hair hasn’t even seen the light of day for at least a year. (See video below.)

MIT says the robotic arm is equipped with a hairbrush helps with brushing tasks and could be “an asset in assistive care settings”.

With rapidly growing demands on health care systems, nurses typically spend 18 to 40 percent of their time performing direct patient care tasks, oftentimes for many patients and with little time to spare. Personal care robots that brush your hair could provide substantial help and relief. [Read more…] about MIT unveils robot that can brush your hair

MIT CSAIL’s robo-starfish enables closer study of aquatic life

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Scientists have invented a ‘robo-starfish’ which give us more insights into aquatic life, as Adam Conner-Simons, or MIT CSAIL, reports. (See video below.)

Biologists have long experienced the challenges of documenting ocean life, with many species of fish proving quite sensitive to the underwater movements of humans.

As a possible solution, computer scientists have been developing special marine robots that can stealthily move among their carbon-based counterparts. In 2018, for example, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) fabricated a soft robotic fish that autonomously swam with real fish along the coral reefs of Fiji.

However, the complex dynamics of how water moves – and its ability to quickly ruin some perfectly good electronics systems – have made underwater robots especially difficult to develop compared to ones for air or land. [Read more…] about MIT CSAIL’s robo-starfish enables closer study of aquatic life

Scientists develop soft robot for exploration in the deepest underwater place on Earth

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Scientists at Zhejiang University in China have developed a soft robot which has been able to navigate the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Earth.

The research team led by Professor LI Tiefeng from the Center for X-Mechanics at the Zhejiang University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Zhejiang Lab conducted inter-disciplinary research with its partners and pioneered in proposing the principle of pressure adaptation in mechatronic systems, and their findings were reported in the journal Nature.

Typically, at such depths in the oceans, a vessel without a pressure-resilient “armor” would be “destroyed by the overwhelmingly hydrostatic pressure”. [Read more…] about Scientists develop soft robot for exploration in the deepest underwater place on Earth

Scientists use ‘swarmalation’ to design active materials for self-regulating soft robots

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During the swarming of birds or fish, each entity coordinates its location relative to the others, so that the swarm moves as one larger, coherent unit.

Fireflies on the other hand coordinate their temporal behavior: within a group, they eventually all flash on and off at the same time and thus act as synchronized oscillators.

Few entities, however, coordinate both their spatial movements and inherent time clocks; the limited examples are termed “swarmalators”, which simultaneously swarm in space and oscillate in time. [Read more…] about Scientists use ‘swarmalation’ to design active materials for self-regulating soft robots

Robots sense human touch using camera and shadows

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Soft robots may not be in touch with human feelings, but they are getting better at feeling human touch.

Cornell University researchers have created a low-cost method for soft, deformable robots to detect a range of physical interactions, from pats to punches to hugs, without relying on touch at all. Instead, a USB camera located inside the robot captures the shadow movements of hand gestures on the robot’s skin and classifies them with machine-learning software.

The group’s paper, ShadowSense: Detecting Human Touch in a Social Robot Using Shadow Image Classification, published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. The paper’s lead author is doctoral student, Yuhan Hu. [Read more…] about Robots sense human touch using camera and shadows