| Michael Tolley, a Harvard graduate student, introduced a robot that bounced on the burst of explosions at a few years ago at the International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems, which has three legs that can swing around and position, Now the Tolley at the University of California, San Diego, has its own robot lab, and the main job of the lab is to find an effective way to make a software robot. In the latest paper (the paper, Next week at ICRA), Tolley shows the four-footed software robot that can walk.  Software robots (with actuators) have the potential to be cheap, flexible, and easy to configure, but at the current level of technology, the software robot is not good enough because you have to do a complete series of manual operations. Dylan Drotman, along with Tolley's lab, completed the leg design of the software robot, and you can print the legs one at a time using the 3D printer, and in fact you can easily print out the entire quadruped robot.
Of course, not all 3D printers meet the requirements, and you need a machine that can print mixed hard and soft materials, so that the final product will have adjustable flexibility. Here, the researchers used Stratasys' Objet 350 Connex3 printer, but this device is not affordable for most people. Each leg of the software robot is made of three retractable inflatable rubber tubes, the area of the inflatable rubber tube in contact with the ground is triangular, and in operation, only two rubber tubes on one leg are inflated, The leg will bend in the direction of the uninflated tube so you have four biaxially controlled soft legs.
The four robots are connected together by X, and the software robot can walk (and crawl completely different) by inflating or leaking. The software robot can lift the leg, move it and complete the forward action. With its soft Characteristics, the researchers can successfully complete the test of different gait, and the robot in different road conditions (rock, sandpaper or cave) to optimize the action.
At the same time, this soft little guy can stand up with a load of 0.62 kilograms, and if it is in a standing state at the beginning, it can carry a heavier burden. The load is very important to the software robot, it can not only back And other useful devices, but also through a number of modifications to achieve the new function.Now, the market of pneumatic robots almost all back a number of actuators, while maintaining its movement of compressed air, batteries and electronic equipment also Can not be less.
Of course, addressing these challenges is not the primary goal of the study, but I wonder if the researchers need to make any further effort to get the robot to market. The use of software robots is easy to guess, and the researchers think Create a perfect quadruped animal that can monitor and read relevant sensor data in a human inaccessible environment. |
