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Advances in skin-inspired robotics have increased in recent years. Snake-inspired scale constructions that allow robots to explore an electronic skin that allows you to monitor your heart rate, it seems that researchers are determined to build robotic devices that are additives rather than independent robots.
It makes a lot of sense if you think about the world around us. The robots themselves are great, but what if we could use robotics to improve our regular environment, and maybe a little boring?
Animation of the inanimate
Now, a Yale team has taken this idea to another level by introducing something that they call "Robotic Skins". The new technology, originally developed for NASA, allows users to animate lifeless objects on a daily basis.
Futuristic skins are made from soft elastic sheets incorporating specialized sensors and actuators developed in the laboratory of Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Yale. If they are placed on a deformable object such as a foam structure, these skins can give the formerly static object movement a real makeshift robot.
These now animated objects can be used to perform a variety of tasks depending on the malleability of objects and the application of skins. The technology gives life (literally) to a whole new range of robots that can have new applications in all kinds of operations, ranging from search and rescue operations to portable assistance.
Limited only by the imagination
Users can use their imagination to design their own unique robotic systems, tailored to their individual needs. "We can take the skins and wrap them around an object to perform a task – locomotion, for example – then remove them and place them on a different object to perform a different task, like grabbing and moving an object. Bottiglio said.
"We can then remove these same skins from this item and put them on a shirt to create an active wearable device," she adds. Robotic skins can be recycled and reinvented to create countless multifunctional robots. Fly.
More impressive, the use of several skins at once allows even more complex movements. "Now we can achieve combined modes of operation – for example, simultaneous compression and flexion," explains Kramer-Bottiglio.
Ideal for the support of space
The technology was first designed in partnership with NASA to meet the needs of the agency. call for flexible robotic systems. He was supposed to allow astronauts to complete a series of tasks with the same reconfigurable hardware.
As space is limited on the International Space Station (ISS), Robotic Skins is a practical and reusable solution for transforming available station materials into useful tools. The skins could, for example, be applied to a piece of foam to make it a robotic arm, then re-applied to create a Mars rover.
Any ISS equipment, from balloons to crumpled paper balls, could become a robot specifically designed to help astronauts in their difficult and varied tasks. Better still, the space being full of surprises, the reconfigurable Robotic Skins could be easily reorganized to create new robots ideal to tackle new situations.
"One of the main things I've considered was the importance of multifunctionality, especially for deep space exploration where the environment is unpredictable" said Kramer-Bottiglio.
The study is published in Science Robotics.
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