The new vacuum-powered Soft Pneumatic Actuator (V-SPA) is soft, lightweight and very easy to fabricate. By using foam and coating it with layers of silicone-rubber, the team have created an actuator that can be made using off the shelf parts without the need for molds – in fact, it takes just two hours to manufacture the V-SPA.

Once produced, the actuators were combined into plug-and-play “V-SPA Modules” which created a simplified design of soft pneumatic robots with many degrees of freedom. In fact, the team created reconfigurable, modular robots using these modules, where every function of the robot was powered by a single shared vacuum source, enabling many different types of capabilities, such as multiple forms of ground locomotion, vertical climbing, object manipulation and stiffness changing.

To test the new modular robot, the team added a suction arm which used the vacuum pump to pick up and move a series of objects, a task that was completed by turning on suction when an object should be carried and allowing the arm to refill with air when the object should be released. Further validation came through attaching suction cups to the robot and using it to climb up a vertical window and using the robot to walk using a number of different gaits (either through use of waves, like a snake, or rolling).

By creating a soft, lightweight actuator that can move in any direction the team hope to enable a new generation of truly soft, compliant robots that can interact safely with the humans that use them.

Reference

M. A. Robertson and J. Paik, “New soft robots really suck: vacuum powered systems empower diverse capabilities,” Science Robotics. doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aan6357

This concludes the ShanghAI Lecture series of 2012. After a wrap-up of the class, we announce the winners of the EmbedIT and NAO competitions and end with an outlook of the future of the ShanghAI Lectures.

Then there are three guest lectures: Tamás Haidegger (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) on surgical robots, Aude Billard (EPFL) on how the body shapes the way we move (and how humans can shape the way robots move), and Jamie Paik (EPFL) on soft robotics.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence run by Rolf Pfeifer and organized by me and partners around the world.

Tamás Haidegger: Human Skills for Robots: Transferring Human Knowledge and Capabilities to Robotic Task Execution in Surgery

Almost 90 years ago, the idea of telesurgery was born, along with the initial concept of robots. From the early 1970s, researchers were focusing on robotic telepresence, to empower surgeons to treat patients at a distance. The first systems appeared over 20 years ago, and robotic surgery has quickly become a standard-of-care for certain procedures—at least in the USA. Over the decades, the control concept remained the same; a human surgeon guiding the robotic tools based on real-time sensory feedback. However, from the beginning of the development, the more exciting (and sometimes frightening) questions have been linked to machine learning, AI and automated surgery. In the true sense of automation, there have only been unclear reports of one single robotically planned and executed surgery so far, despite the fact that many research groups are working on the problem. This talk introduces the major efforts currently undertaken in centers of excellence around the globe to transfer the incredibly diverse and versatile human cognition into the domain of surgical robotics.

References

• P. Kazanzides, G. Fichtinger, G. D. Hager, A. M. Okamura, L. L. Whitcomb, and R. H. Taylor, “Surgical and Interventional Robotics: part I,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM), vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 122–130, 2008.
• G. Fichtinger , P. Kazanzides, G. D. Hager, A. M. Okamura, L. L. Whitcomb, and R. H. Taylor, “Surgical and Interventional Robotics: part II,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM), vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 94–102, 2008.
• G. Hager, A. Okamura, P. Kazanzides, L. Whitcomb, G. Fichtinger, and R. Taylor, “Surgical and Interventional Robotics: part III,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM), vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 84–93, 2008.
• C. E. Reiley, H. C. Lin, D. D. Yuh, G. D. Hager. “A Review of Methods for Objective Surgical Skill Evaluation,” Surgical Endoscopy, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 356–366, 2011.

Aude Billard: How the body shapes the way we move and how humans can shape the way robots move

In this lecture Aude Billard advocates that it is advantageous to have robots move with a dynamics that resembles the dynamics of motion of natural bodies, even if the robots do not resemble humans in their physical appearance (e.g. industrial robots). This will make their motion more predictable for humans and hence make the interaction safer. She then briefly presents current approaches to modeling the dynamics of human motion in robots.

A survey of issues on robot learning from human demonstration can be found at:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Robot_learning_by_demonstration

Jamie Paik: SOFT Robot Challenge and 
Robogamis

Jamie Paik describes origami robots and their ability to fold into a variety of shapes. The concept, originally designed at the Wyss Institute at Harvard and at MIT, enables a new type of programmable matter whose properties can be programmed to achieve specific shapes or stiffnesses on command. Such soft robots have gathered attention in recent years for their potential to shift the mindset from rigid robot bodies made of metal, screws and bolts to robots with deformable and compliant bodies, which like most biological systems contain many degrees of freedom.

Stéphanie Lacour was selected as Technology Review’s annual list of 35 Innovators under 35 for her work on the development of semiconductor devices that can stretch and still retain their electronic properties. Such materials could be used in the future to create artificial skin that interfaces with the nervous system of a patient to feed control signals to prosthetics or for the design of flexible electronic circuits for soft robots.