[ad_1]
If she can dream of a pancake, she may yearn for her legs to jump off your breakfast plate in search of a better, unchewed life.
But apparently, legs aren’t necessary for something flat like a flapjack to bounce around. A group of scientists has designed a tortilla-shaped robot that can jump several times a second and rise to more than seven times its body height of half an centimeter. They report that the robot, which is about the size of a crushed tennis ball and weighs about the same as a paper clip, performs these features agilely without any foot appearance. Their research was published Tuesday in the journal Nature. Nature Communication.
Shuguang Li, a roboticist at Harvard who was not involved in the research, described the new robot as “a clever idea” and “an important contribution to the field of soft robotics.”
Many terrestrial robots, that is, those that are at home on the ground rather than in the air or water, move by rolling or walking. But the ability to jump can help a terrestrial robot traverse new areas and navigate rough terrain; Sometimes it’s more efficient for a robot to jump over an obstacle than to get around it, wrote Rui Chen, a researcher at Chongqing University in China and author of the paper, in an email.
Although jumping may offer some robots a competitive advantage, engineering this ability has been a challenge for robotics researchers. Some energy-storing soft robots may seldom make a single, impressive leap. Some light, soft robots that do not store energy can jump very often, but not high or far enough to successfully cross an obstacle such as a pavement.
The ideal jumping robot will be able to jump high and far frequently. However, Dr. “These two pursuits are contradictory,” Chen said. Jumping higher or far requires more energy, and jumping more often requires that energy to be accumulated and released over a shorter period of time – a long task for a small robot.
For inspiration, the researchers looked to mid-biliary larvae, or maggots. miraculously throw themselves over distances 30 times longer than their log-like bodies, which are one-tenth of an inch long. Dr. “Most creatures need feet to jump,” said Chen, adding that the larvae “can jump by twisting their bodies.” The maggot crushes itself into a ring—gluing it to the back of its head with special sticky bristles—and hardens it by squeezing the liquid toward one end of its body. The accumulation of fluid builds pressure, and the release of pressure causes the maggot to rise.
The robot’s disc-like body does not resemble that of a gall-comb larva, but hops like a wolf. Its body is made of two plastic bags printed with electrodes; The anterior sac is filled with liquid and the posterior part is filled with the same volume of air. The robot uses static electricity to direct the flow of fluid to deform parts of its body, which causes the body to bend and create force with the ground, causing a bounce. And the air sac mimics the function of an animal’s tail, helping the robot stay in a stable position while jumping and landing.
This design allows the robot to jump 7.68 times body height and has a sustained jump rate of six body lengths per second – Dr. A speed that Li calls “very impressive.”
So the robot can jump quickly and continuously. But can he overcome the obstacles? To find out, the researchers put the little robot through countless tests, perhaps because it deserves a movie montage as inspiring as Sylvester Stallone’s “Sylvester Stallone” tutorial.Cliff”
The robot had to traverse various gravel hills, slopes and wires. It had to skip a round five-millimeter-high step and cross an eight-millimeter-long empty ring—monumental barriers for a four-millimeter-tall robot with a pancake-like body. The amateur acrobat easily passed all these tests, although not gracefully.
Dr. Chen said the robot can change direction on its own at about 138 degrees per second — the fastest turn speed of any soft jump robot. According to Wenqi Hu, a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany who was not involved in the research, the robot can steer itself by constantly turning, just like a car.
The robot relies on external power powered by electrical wires. Dr. Chen said the researchers want to make the robot wireless in future iterations, but keeping the robot small and light will be difficult.
Dr. “I wonder if adding an on-board power supply would be difficult for this little soft jumper,” Li said.
The researchers propose integrating sensors into the tiny robot to allow it to detect environmental conditions such as pollutants in buildings. Dr. Li suggested that the robot could eventually inspect hard-to-reach areas of large industrial machinery, or be used in search and rescue missions for trapped people or animals, as it can pass through small spaces if equipped with a small camera. Gaps in disaster areas. And, he added, the robot is small and inexpensive. Dr. “It will probably only cost a few dollars to build one,” Li said.
Although the robot is currently limited to Earth, Dr. Hu suggested he might be at home to explore another planet. Dr. “This type of mission requires a simple yet robust miniature robot design that is light enough to be transported to new worlds,” Hu said, adding that the materials needed to build this robot must survive and operate in extraterrestrial environments.
If that’s true, the researchers’ robot could jump over dusty rocks and craters on the moon or Mars, going where no observatory has gone before.
[ad_2]
Source link