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When you think of robots, you usually think of a 3D being that manipulates the world around it. But researchers at Yale University have taken a different approach, turning away from nature to design "robotic skins" that wrap existing objects and manipulate them from the outside. It's an out-of-the-ordinary solution for solving space-age problems, even though its inventors hope it will also have applications on Earth.
"It's a flat robot that has artificial muscles and sensors to detect how much these muscles have contracted," says study author Joran Booth. "We can control things that are around us."
Potentially, any soft object could become a robot with the skin slipped: a piece of foam, a ball or even a stuffed horse, as shown in a video published by Yale.
Depending on the nature of the object and the way the skin is applied, the robots can be used for all kinds of things.
In an environment such as space, where astronauts have only a limited carrying capacity but may need unexpected tasks, these robots, which do not take up much space and can help to adapt existing objects, can reveal an asset. They were designed in the flexible robotics laboratory of Rebecca Kramer-Bottaglio, also known as Faboratory, with special attention paid to the utility out of the world.
After NASA solicited soft robots for astronauts, Booth and Kramer-Bottaglio wrote in an email to Popular scienceKramer-Bottaglio began to think about "some of the constraints when sending robots into space – mainly the high cost of transport per unit mass and volume. The question I found myself was: if, in addition to trying to reduce the weight and size of robots for space applications, we were also trying to reduce the number of robots?
Part of the project, which turned out to be unexpectedly difficult, involved working together all the robot's parts – the artificial muscles, the "skin" and the sensors that controlled their relationship with each other. The team struggled to help the sensors understand the length of the artificial muscles and make everything work together. In this article, they demonstrate that they could make different skin shapes and different types of "muscle movements" at will.
In the future, however, "potential robotic skin types will be very important," says Booth. In the examples of paper – two rectangles, an elastomeric skin with pneumatic "actuators" (AKA muscles), a fabric skin with metal alloy actuators and a fabric triangle with alloy actuators on all sides – there There is a lot of room to grow by mixing and combining components. These flat robots have a multitude of potential uses, from creating a posture correction shirt described in the paper (above) to a multi-component clamp to grab objects.
"Our concept is simple, but it's interesting to note that we did not find anything like it in the literature," Booth wrote. "We think it's because the concept is not exactly bio-inspired – we have not found any examples of natural organisms with completely passive bodies and active skin." But when building artificial systems, this approach gives us a huge design space.
The only question now is how to name a flat robot. Crepe?
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