Image: Harvard Gazette

By Peter Reuell, Harvard Staff Writer

At the beginning of the decade, George Whitesides helped rewrite the rules of what a machine could be with the development of biologically inspired “soft robots.” Now he’s poised to rewrite them again, with help from some plastic drinking straws.

Inspired by arthropod insects and spiders, Whitesides and Alex Nemiroski, a former postdoctoral fellow in Whitesides’ Harvard lab, have created a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing and walking. The team also created a robotic water strider capable of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots are described in a recently published paper in the journal Soft Robotics.

Unlike earlier generations of soft robots, which could stand and awkwardly walk by inflating air chambers in their bodies, the new robots are designed to be far nimbler. Though real-world applications are still far off, the researchers hope the robots eventually could be used in search operations following natural disasters or in conflict zones.

“If you look around the world, there are a lot of things, like spiders and insects, that are very agile,” said Whitesides, the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard. “They can move rapidly, climb on various items, and are able to do things that large, hard robots can’t do because of their weight and form factor. They are among the most versatile organisms on the planet. The question was, how can we build something like that?”

The answer, Nemiroski said, came in the form of your average drinking straw.

“This all started with an observation that George made, that polypropylene tubes have an excellent strength-to-weight ratio. That opened the door to creating something that has more structural support than purely soft robots have,” he said. “That was the building block, and then we took inspiration from arthropods to figure out how to make a joint and how to use the tubes as an exoskeleton. From there it was a question of how far can your imagination go? Once you have a Lego brick, what kind of castle can you build with it?”

What they built, he said, is a surprisingly simple joint.

Whitesides and Nemiroski began by cutting a notch in the straws, allowing them to bend. The scientists then inserted short lengths of tubing which, when inflated, would force the joints to extend. A rubber tendon attached on either side would then cause the joint to retract when the tubing deflated.

Armed with that simple concept, the team built a one-legged robot capable of crawling, and moved up in complexity as they added a second and then a third leg, allowing the robot to stand on its own.

“With every new level of systems complexity, we would have to go back to the original joint and make modifications to make it capable of exerting more force or to be able to support the weight of larger robots,” Nemiroski said. “Eventually, when we graduated to six- or eight-legged arthrobots, making them walk became a challenge from a programming perspective. For example, we looked at the way ants and spiders sequence the motion of their limbs and then tried to figure out whether aspects of these motions were applicable to what we were doing or whether we’d need to develop our own type of walking tailored to these specific types of joints.”

While Nemiroski and colleagues were able to control simple robots by hand, using syringes, they turned to computers to control the sequencing of their limbs as the designs increased in complexity.

“We put together a microcontroller run by Arduino that uses valves and a central compressor,” he said. “That allowed us the freedom to evolve their gait rapidly.”

Though Nemiroski and colleagues were able to replicate ants’ distinctive “triangle” gait using their six-legged robot, duplicating a spider-like gait proved far trickier.

“A spider has the ability to modulate the speed at which it extends and contracts its joints to carefully time which limbs are moving forward or backward at any moment,” Nemiroski said. “But in our case, the joints’ motion is binary due to the simplicity of our valving system. Either you switch the valve to the pressure source to inflate the balloon in the joint, and thus extend the limb, or you switch the valve to atmosphere to deflate the joint and thus retract the limb. So in the case of the eight-legged robot, we had to develop our own gait compatible with the binary motion of our joints. I’m sure it’s not a brand-new gait, but we could not duplicate precisely how a spider moves for this robot.”

Developing a system that can fine-tune the speed of actuation of the legs, Nemiroski said, would be a useful goal for future research, and would require programmable control over the flow rate supplied to each joint.

“We hit that limitation in the system, which I’m actually pretty proud of, because it means we pushed it to its absolute limit,” he said. “We took the basic concept and asked how far can we go before we would have to make radical alterations to how these limbs work, and we found that limit at the eight-legged robot. We were able to make it walk, but if you wanted to make it walk faster, or to add more limbs — for example, to support a load — you would have to start rethinking the system from the ground up.”

Though it may be years before the robots find their way into real-world applications, Whitesides believes the techniques used in their development — particularly the use of everyday, off-the-shelf materials — can point the way toward future innovations.

“I don’t see any reason to reinvent wheels,” he said. “If you look at drinking straws, they can make them at, effectively, zero cost and with great strength, so why not use them? These are academic prototypes, so they’re very light weight, but it would be fairly easy to imagine building these with a lightweight structural polymer that could hold a substantial weight.”

“What’s really attractive here is the simplicity,” added Nemiroski. “This is something George has been championing for some time, and something I grew to appreciate deeply while I was in his lab. For all the complexity of movement and structural integrity we get out of these robots, they’re remarkably simple in terms of construction and control. Using a single, easy-to-find material and a single concept for an actuator, we could achieve complex, multidimensional motion.”

This post was originally published on The Harvard Gazette. Click here to view the original.

This research was supported with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, DARPA, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Tissue-engineered soft robotic ray that’s controlled with light. Karaghen Hudson and Michael Rosnach, CC BY-ND

The way animals move has yet to be matched by robotic systems. This is because biological systems exploit compliant mechanisms in ways their robotic cousins do not. However, recent advances in soft robotics aim to address these issues.

The stereotypical robot gait consists of jerky, uncoordinated and unstable movements. This is in stark contrast to the graceful, fluid movements seen throughout the animal kingdom. In part, this is because robots are built of rigid often metallic links, unlike their biological cousins which use a mixture of hard and soft materials.

A key challenge for soft and hybrid hard-soft robotics is control. The use of rigid materials means it is possible to build relatively simple mathematical models of the system, which can be used to find control laws. Without rigid materials, the model balloons in complexity, leading to systems which cannot feasibly be used to derive control laws.

One possible approach is to offload some of the responsibility for producing a behaviour from the controller to the body of the system. Some examples of systems that take this approach include the Lipson-Jaeger gripper, various dynamic walkers, and the 1-DOF swimming robot Wanda. This offloading of responsibility from the controller to the body is called ‘Morphological Computation.’

There are a number of mechanisms in which the body can reduce the burden placed on a controller: it can limit the range of available behaviours, reducing the need for a complex model of the system[1] structure the sensory data in a way that simplifies state observation[2], or it can be used as an explicit computational resource.

The idea of an arm or leg as a computer may strike people as odd. The clean lines of a Macbook look much different than our wobbly appendages. In what sense, then, is it reasonable to claim that such systems can be used as computers?

Computational capacity

To make the concept clear, it is necessary to first introduce the concept of computational capacity. In a digital computer, transistors compute logical operations such as AND and XOR, but computation is possible via any system which can take inputs to outputs.

For example, we could use a system which classifies numbers as either positive or negative as a basic building block. More complex computations can be achieved by connecting these basic units together.

Of course, not all choices of mapping are equally useful. In some cases, computations that we wish to carry out may not be possible if we have chosen the wrong building block. The computational capacity of a system is a measure of how complex a calculation we can perform by combining our basic computational unit.

To make this more concrete, it is helpful to introduce perceptrons: the forebears of today’s deep learning systems. A perceptron takes a set number of inputs and produces either a 1 or 0 as an output. To calculate the output for a given input, we follow a simple process:

1. Multiply each input x_i by its corresponding weight w_i
2. Sum the weighted inputs
3. Output 1 if the sum is above a threshold and output 0 otherwise.

In order to make a perceptron perform a specific computation, we have to find the corresponding set of weights.

If we consider the perceptron as our basic building block for computation, can we ask what kinds of computation we can perform?

It has been shown that perceptrons are limited to the computation of linear functions; a perceptron cannot, for example, correctly learn to compute the XOR function.[3]

To overcome this limitation, it is necessary to expand the complexity of the computational system. In the case of the perceptron, we can add “hidden” layers, turning the perceptron into a neural network. Neural networks with enough hidden layers are in theory capable of computing almost any function which depends only upon its input at the current time.[4]

If we desire a system that can perform computations that depend on prior inputs (i.e. have memory), then we need to add recurrent connections, which connect a node to itself. Recurrent neural networks have been shown to be Turing complete, which means they could, in theory, be used as a basis for a general purpose computer. [5]

FIGURE (FFNN and RNN)

These considerations give us a set of criteria by which we can begin to assess the computational capacity of a system — we can classify the computational capacity by the amount of non-linearity and memory that a system has.

The capacity of bodies

Returning to the explicit use of a body as a computational structure, we can begin to consider the capacity of a body. To start with, we need to define an input and output for our computer.

In most cases, the body of a robot will contain both actuators and sensors. If we limit ourselves to systems with a single actuator, then the natural definitions would be to take the actuator as the input and the sensors as the output. To simplify the output, we can take a weighted sum of the sensor readings; we know the limitations of the perceptron that this will not add either memory or non-linearity to our system.

FIGURES (OCTOPUS SYSTEM)

Platform set-up for a soft silicone arm. (a) A soft silicone arm, which contains 10 bend sensors, is immersed underwater. Sensors are connected to a sensory board by the red wires. The wires are set as carefully as possible so as not to affect the arm motion. (b) Motor commands take binary states. When these commands are set to 0 (1), the base of the arm rotates to the right (left)-hand side towards Lright (Lleft). See the main text for details. (Online version in colour.) Credit: Journal of the Royal Society Interface

Schematic showing the information processing scheme using the arm. Input is provided to the motor command to generate arm motion, and the embedded bend sensors reflect the resulting body dynamics. By using the detected sensory timeseries, the binary state output is generated by thresholding the weighted sum of the sensory values. See the main text for details. Credit: Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Given such a setup, we can then test the ability of the system to perform certain computations. What kind of computations can this system perform?

To answer this question, Nakajima et al.[6] used a silicone arm, inspired by an octopus tentacle. The arm was actuated by a single servo motor and contained a number of stretch sensors embedded within it.

Amazingly, this system was shown to be capable of computing a number of functions that required both non-linearity and memory. For example, the arm was shown to be capable of acting as a parity bit checker. Given a sequence of inputs (either 1 or 0), the system would output a 1 if there was an even number of 1s in the input and 0 otherwise. Such a task requires both memory of prior inputs and non-linearity. As the readout cannot add either of these, we must conclude that the body itself has added this capacity; in other words, the body contributes computational capacity to the system.

Examples of the output time series for the function emulation tasks. (a) Plots showing the example of the performance in the short-term memory task with τstate = 5. (b) Plots showing the example of the performance in the N-bit parity check task with τstate = 11. The open squares show the target outputs and the filled squares show the system outputs, and the cases for n = 1, 2, 3 and 4 are shown. (Online version in colour.)

Prospects and outlook

A number of systems which exploit the explicit computational capacity of the body have already been built. For example, the Kitty robot [7] uses its compliant spine to compute a control signal. Different behaviours can be achieved by adjusting the weights of the readout, and the controller is robust to certain perturbations.

As a next step, we are investigating the role of adaptive bodies. Many biological systems are capable of not only changing their control but also adjusting the properties of their bodies. Finding the right morphology can simplify control as discussed in the introduction. However, it will also affect the computational capacity of the body. We are investigating the connection between the computational capacity of a body and its behaviour.

References:

Figures, The Octopus System

http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/100/20140437.short

[1] Tedrake, Russ, Teresa Weirui Zhang, and H. Sebastian Seung. “Learning to walk in 20 minutes.” Proceedings of the Fourteenth Yale Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Systems. Vol. 95585. 2005.

[2] Lichtensteiger, Lukas, and Peter Eggenberger. “Evolving the morphology of a compound eye on a robot.” Advanced Mobile Robots, 1999.(Eurobot’99) 1999 Third European Workshop on. IEEE, 1999.

[3] Minsky, Marvin, and Seymour Papert. “Perceptrons.” (1969).

[4] Hornik, Kurt. “Approximation capabilities of multilayer feedforward networks.” Neural networks 4.2 (1991): 251-257.

[5] Siegelmann, Hava T., and Eduardo D. Sontag. “On the computational power of neural nets.” Journal of computer and system sciences 50.1 (1995): 132-150.

[6] Nakajima, Kohei, et al. “Exploiting short-term memory in soft body dynamics as a computational resource.” Journal of The Royal Society Interface 11.100 (2014): 20140437.

[7] Zhao, Qian, et al. “Spine dynamics as a computational resource in spine-driven quadruped locomotion.” Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on. IEEE, 2013.

Jamie Paik with a robot. Credit: NCCR Robotics

Meet the NCCR Robotics Paik Lab (RRL, EPFL) – headed by Professor Jamie Paik, the lab is dedicated to creating interactive robotic systems using cutting edge manufacturing techniques. The lab specialises in creating soft, foldable robots for use in a variety of situations, including creating compliant robotic assistive devices for people with disabilities.

If you enjoyed this ‘meet the lab’ video, you can also watch another in the NCCR Robotics series below:

A complex interplay of various sensor systems ensures that the SCHUNK Co-act Gripper JL1 permanently records the data of its surrounding. Source: Schunk

Tactile sensing and force feedback are – and have been – problem areas for robot grasping. Humans could see, select and pick so much faster. Yet to handle the millions of different everyday items in our factories and warehouses, costly positioning and camera systems have been required. These systems made it easy for fast robots with simple grippers to pick items as they came along – but at great cost.

Chicago’s huge McCormick Place Conference Center was once again home to the Automate and ProMat trade shows. Automate for robotics; ProMat for material handling solutions. Over 900 exhibitors covered 350,000 sq ft at ProMat while 400+ companies exhibited at the Automate show.

Up until recently no vendor has been able to randomly grasp – at speed – all the different products needing to be handled. A major objective of improved grasping – in addition to supplementing or replacing human labor – is to reduce the high cost of fixtures, conveyors, sorting and positioning systems.

The challenge to low-cost effective grasping was described in the U.S. Robotics Roadmap:

“Challenges include fundamental 1st principles of physics in the development of actuation and sensing. Other challenges include 2 point discrimination, contact localization, extrinsic and intrinsic actuation, back-drivability vs. compliance, speed/strength/power, hand/glove coverings that do not attenuate sensors/motion but are rugged when handling rough and sharp objects.”

This year a few companies demonstrated smart gripper systems that can piece-pick random goods at speed – far ahead of the research schedule in the Roadmap. Here are two that were at the show:

• RightHand Robotics was demonstrating their piece-picking solution – a vacuum stick supported by 3-fingers, and 3D vision software that can handle 1000s of SKUs, operate at high speed, has sensor feedback to learn by trial and error and also to ensure accurate order fulfillment.
  • Many of RightHand’s piece-picking gripper and software solutions were the end-of-arm-tool of choice on robot arms in other vendor booths.
  • Emphasizing their software and systems, RightHand was promoting them to be integrated into warehouse workflows including goods-to-picker systems, picking to unit sorters, autobagger induction, and kitting.
• Kinema Systems demonstrated their Kinema Pick deep learning 3D vision system which speedily depalletizes multi-SKU, randomly arranged pallets of various sized boxes.

Also demonstrated were grippers with lights or other forms of HRI because studies have shown that human-robot collaboration needs communication – even from colored lights – to facilitate adoption.

• Rethink Robotics has been a leader in this type of HRI. Their Sawyer robot uses screen eyes and tower and wrist colored lights to indicate movement, training and problems.
• Schunk‘s new elegant Co-act WSG gripper has finger lights that change color to indicate different modes of activity: red for training and problems; blue for safe operation; etc. using LEDs and a corresponding color coding system.

End-of-arm-tooling (EAOT) /  gripper providers

EAOT is a moving target with multiple new vendors showing up frequently. The list below is of companies that actually produce and market grippers for industrial and collaborative robots now. Most did not have booths at the show. It is not, by any means, a complete list of gripper providers and doesn’t include the growing list of Chinese providers. Nor does the list include vision, tool-changer or sensor providers, or grippers made by industrial robot manufacturers. Follow the highlighted links to get technical specifications.

Robot in assembly at Hall 52 on June 26, 2013. File: 062513GR34

There is growing demand for more flexibility in factories and shops. Collaborative robotics, a sub-set of service robotics in labs, manufacturing and material handling, is where the action is today because co-bots are meeting these new demands, while caged legacy robots are not.

Service and assistance robotics, with and without mobility, are an emerging and somewhat futuristic field, albeit one which is developing rapidly. Vision and tactile sensors, safety features, mobility, and simple, fast and intuitive robot training, are all playing important roles in many application areas.

As robots can be trusted to safely work alongside humans and are relatively portable and easy to program, business managers, from all sized companies, begin to imagine uses within their labs, facilities, factories and shops – uses where robots and humans collaboratively work together to improve productivity and efficiency by using the robot where it is better than its human partners, and vice versa.

Definitions, features and applications

The objective of collaborative robotics is to combine the repetitive performance of robots with the individual skills and abilities of people. People are better at seeing and solving imprecise situations; robots can be more precise, powerful, and perform longer.

Wikipedia says a cobot or co-robot (from collaborative robot) is a robot intended to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace. This is in contrast with other robots, designed to operate autonomously or with limited guidance, which is what most industrial robots do. Cobots can have many roles — from autonomous robots capable of working together with humans in an office setting that can ask for help, to industrial robots having their protective guards removed as they can react to a human presence under EN ISO 10218 which requires the robot or robot application comply with one of four collaborative modes: Safety-Rated Monitored Stop; Hand Guiding; Speed and Separation Monitoring; and Power and Force Limitation.

Most of these new co-bots share a growing list of features:

• Affordable cost
• Plug and play
• Intuitive programmability
• Narrow width
• Precise movements as good or better than a human
• Safe to work alongside
  • Complies with ISO 10218 and/or ISO 15066
  • ABB launched SafeMove2, a software sensor suite that, when activited, makes their robots human-safe.
    • Human safe isn’t necessarily collaborative
• Speedy movements as good or faster than a human
• Portability
• ROS

Co-bots are emerging in a variety of verticals:

• Security and surveillance
• Loading/unloading and material handling
• Quality control, testing and measuring
• Guides and sales assistance
• Consumer products
• Industrial tasks (such as):
  • Pick and place
  • Assembly
  • Machine tending
  • Polishing, sealing and deburring
  • Gluing, dispensing and welding
  • Handling and packaging

Numbers

Trade shows tend to feature business solutions 5-10 years ahead of their actual deployment. Bin picking was the trend 10 years ago at robotics trade shows. For the last 5 years, collaborative robotics has been prominently displayed and demonstrated, and the numbers and forecasts showing up in research reports are beginning to prove that the trend is emerging and the collaborative segment of the robotics industry is growing exponentially. In their 2017 Worldwide 10 Robotics Predictions report, IDC said:

Prediction 7: Collaborative Robots — By 2018, 30% of all new robotic deployments will be smart collaborative robots that operate three times faster than today’s robots and are safe for work around humans.

• Transparency Market Research, in their January 2017, 147-page analysis which costs $5,795, forecast that the co-bot market will be worth $95 billion by the end of 2024 and will be growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30% from now until then.
• Research and Markets, in a November 2016 165-page report costing $3,999, forecast that collaborative industrial robot sales will reach $2 billion by 2021 at an annual CAGR of more than 60%.
• Markets and Markets, in their August 2016, 157-page report which costs $5,650, also forecasts a high CAGR: 60% between 2016 and 2022.

(UR) reflects those phenomenal growth figures. Annual sales have risen from $10 million in 2012 to $95 million in 2016 with revenue expected to be $140 million in 2017.

Beginning from 2017, however, competition will become more prevalent on many fronts from a variety of emerging co-bot companies described below.

Industrial co-bot makers

Most SME’s have a low cost threshold for capital expenditures like robots, thus pricing is a serious consideration. ROI (return on investment) is also important. Universal Robots started a clever advertising campaign using videos showing application use cases and prominently featuring the payback period – from as little as 3-4 months to a year; very respectable in ROI terms. Consequently the wide range of prices for co-bots is most often tempered by the use case(s), ease of use, and ROI. Prices begin at $3,000 for the Chinese-made Dobot, to $11k for the new German Franka, to $29k for an American Sawyer, $35k for a Danish UR10, all the way to $60k for Swiss ABB’s YuMi and up to $100k for Germany’s Kuka LBR iiwa.

Listed below are current and soon-to-launch co-bot providers. This is a moving target, i.e., there are new companies popping up each day. I’m sure to find and add new ones after my trip to Automate/ProMat in Chicago next week.  Follow the company/product links to get detailed technical specifications.

End-of-arm-tooling (EAOT) /  gripper providers

EAOT too is a moving target with multiple new vendors showing up frequently. The list below, however, is a list of companies that actually produce and market grippers for co-bots now. It doesn’t include vision, tool-changer or sensor providers. Follow the highlighted links to get detailed technical specifications.

Resources

• CobotsGuide
• Robotiq
  • eBook: Grippers for Collaborative Robots
  • eBook: ISO/TS 15066 Explained
  • eBook: Collaborative Robot 3rd Edition
• ROS and ROS-Industrial

The Nereis virens worm inspired new research out of the MIT Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics. Its jaw is made of soft organic material, but is as strong as harder materials such as human dentin. Photo: Alexander Semenov/Wikimedia Commons

A new material that naturally adapts to changing environments was inspired by the strength, stability, and mechanical performance of the jaw of a marine worm. The protein material, which was designed and modeled by researchers from the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), and synthesized in collaboration with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, expands and contracts based on changing pH levels and ion concentrations. It was developed by studying how the jaw of Nereis virens, a sand worm, forms and adapts in different environments.

The resulting pH- and ion-sensitive material is able to respond and react to its environment. Understanding this naturally-occurring process can be particularly helpful for active control of the motion or deformation of actuators for soft robotics and sensors without using external power supply or complex electronic controlling devices. It could also be used to build autonomous structures.

“The ability of dramatically altering the material properties, by changing its hierarchical structure starting at the chemical level, offers exciting new opportunities to tune the material, and to build upon the natural material design towards new engineering applications,” wrote Markus J. Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering, head of CEE, and senior author of the paper.

The research, recently published in ACS Nano, shows that depending on the ions and pH levels in the environment, the protein material expands and contracts into different geometric patterns. When the conditions change again, the material reverts back to its original shape. This makes it particularly useful for smart composite materials with tunable mechanics and self-powered roboticists that use pH value and ion condition to change the material stiffness or generate functional deformations.

Finding inspiration in the strong, stable jaw of a marine worm

In order to create bio-inspired materials that can be used for soft robotics, sensors, and other uses — such as that inspired by the Nereis — engineers and scientists at LAMM and AFRL needed to first understand how these materials form in the Nereis worm, and how they ultimately behave in various environments. This understanding involved the development of a model that encompasses all different length scales from the atomic level, and is able to predict the material behavior. This model helps to fully understand the Nereis worm and its exceptional strength.

“Working with AFRL gave us the opportunity to pair our atomistic simulations with experiments,” said CEE research scientist Francisco Martin-Martinez. AFRL experimentally synthesized a hydrogel, a gel-like material made mostly of water, which is composed of recombinant Nvjp-1 protein responsible for the structural stability and impressive mechanical performance of the Nereis jaw. The hydrogel was used to test how the protein shrinks and changes behavior based on pH and ions in the environment.

The Nereis jaw is mostly made of organic matter, meaning it is a soft protein material with a consistency similar to gelatin. In spite of this, its strength, which has been reported to have a hardness ranging between 0.4 and 0.8 gigapascals (GPa), is similar to that of harder materials like human dentin. “It’s quite remarkable that this soft protein material, with a consistency akin to Jell-O, can be as strong as calcified minerals that are found in human dentin and harder materials such as bones,” Buehler said.

At MIT, the researchers looked at the makeup of the Nereis jaw on a molecular scale to see what makes the jaw so strong and adaptive. At this scale, the metal-coordinated crosslinks, the presence of metal in its molecular structure, provide a molecular network that makes the material stronger and at the same time make the molecular bond more dynamic, and ultimately able to respond to changing conditions. At the macroscopic scale, these dynamic metal-protein bonds result in an expansion/contraction behavior.

Combining the protein structural studies from AFRL with the molecular understanding from LAMM, Buehler, Martin-Martinez, CEE Research Scientist Zhao Qin, and former PhD student Chia-Ching Chou ’15, created a multiscale model that is able to predict the mechanical behavior of materials that contain this protein in various environments. “These atomistic simulations help us to visualize the atomic arrangements and molecular conformations that underlay the mechanical performance of these materials,” Martin-Martinez said.

Specifically, using this model the research team was able to design, test, and visualize how different molecular networks change and adapt to various pH levels, taking into account the biological and mechanical properties.

By looking at the molecular and biological makeup of a the Nereis virens and using the predictive model of the mechanical behavior of the resulting protein material, the LAMM researchers were able to more fully understand the protein material at different scales and provide a comprehensive understanding of how such protein materials form and behave in differing pH settings. This understanding guides new material designs for soft robots and sensors.

Identifying the link between environmental properties and movement in the material

The predictive model explained how the pH sensitive materials change shape and behavior, which the researchers used for designing new PH-changing geometric structures. Depending on the original geometric shape tested in the protein material and the properties surrounding it, the LAMM researchers found that the material either spirals or takes a Cypraea shell-like shape when the pH levels are changed. These are only some examples of the potential that this new material could have for developing soft robots, sensors, and autonomous structures.

Using the predictive model, the research team found that the material not only changes form, but it also reverts back to its original shape when the pH levels change. At the molecular level, histidine amino acids present in the protein bind strongly to the ions in the environment. This very local chemical reaction between amino acids and metal ions has an effect in the overall conformation of the protein at a larger scale. When environmental conditions change, the histidine-metal interactions change accordingly, which affect the protein conformation and in turn the material response.

“Changing the pH or changing the ions is like flipping a switch. You switch it on or off, depending on what environment you select, and the hydrogel expands or contracts” said Martin-Martinez.

LAMM found that at the molecular level, the structure of the protein material is strengthened when the environment contains zinc ions and certain pH levels. This creates more stable metal-coordinated crosslinks in the material’s molecular structure, which makes the molecules more dynamic and flexible.

This insight into the material’s design and its flexibility is extremely useful for environments with changing pH levels. Its response of changing its figure to changing acidity levels could be used for soft robotics. “Most soft robotics require power supply to drive the motion and to be controlled by complex electronic devices. Our work toward designing of multifunctional material may provide another pathway to directly control the material property and deformation without electronic devices,” said Qin.

By studying and modeling the molecular makeup and the behavior of the primary protein responsible for the mechanical properties ideal for Nereis jaw performance, the LAMM researchers are able to link environmental properties to movement in the material and have a more comprehensive understanding of the strength of the Nereis jaw.

The research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) for the simulations.

Cobalt Robotics has launched their stylish security robot. The robot was designed by Yves Behar and as a fabric covered robot, it’s putting a new spin on soft robotics! Behar’s goal was to create a robot that didn’t conform to Hollywood stereotypes but instead as an augmentation of human ability and an enhancement to the human environment.

“Creating the right form for Cobalt is crucial to its success. As a service for security and concierge, it becomes part of an office culture. This balance between approachability and discretion became a thematic challenge throughout the design process. We decided that the robot should not adopt a humanoid personality. Instead, it should aesthetically align with the furniture and décor of the office environment. The Cobalt robot’s semi-cylindrical self-driving mechanism, sensors and cameras are covered by a tensile fabric skirt. This helps maximize the access and usability of the internal technologies, creates airflow to prevent overheating, and conveys a soft and friendly persona.” said Behar.

Cobalt Robotics was founded by Travis Deyle and Erik Schluntz, former GoogleX and SpaceX engineers. After a thorough analysis of the various emerging service robotics industries, they focused on the security industry rather than retail, logistics, or hospitality, because the economics made the most sense.

“A fleet of Cobalt robots is comparable to an extremely competent guard with superhuman capabilities and omnipresent situational awareness across an entire organization,” said Cobalt CEO and Co-Founder Travis Deyle.

Security is necessary but it’s often cost prohibitive for companies to provide a 24-hour security presence. The Cobalt robot allows security to have a presence so that they can remote in, see what’s going on, look for intruders, and it also serves a purpose for the employees. If something bad happens, it’s currently on the employee to either call the police or fumble around looking for the security number of their corporate office. Cobalt lets them go up to the robot and immediately get a person to talk to.

“One of the core fundamental values of Cobalt is to enable human-to-machine interactions,” said Erik Schluntz, Cobalt CTO and Co-Founder. “The way we do that is designing a robot to interact with and around people.”

Cobalt worked with world-renowned designer Yves Behar and his company, fuseproject, to define the form and interactions. The balance between approachability and discretion became a thematic challenge throughout the design process.

“As robotics and AI touch more areas of our daily lives, the role of the designer is to make these technologies accessible, augment our abilities and create our best possible future,” says industrial designer Yves Behar. “The Cobalt design is very different in that it is made of fabric and aluminum, an aesthetic more akin to furniture and workspaces than a Hollywood robot.”

Using extremely capable sensors (day-night 360° cameras, thermal cameras, depth cameras, LIDAR, etc.) and cutting-edge algorithms (machine learning, semantic mapping, novelty detection, and deep neural networks), the Cobalt robot detects and flags security-relevant conditions or anomalies — things like people, doors & windows, suspicious items, items that have moved or changed, and water leaks. Bloomberg Beta and Promus Ventures led Cobalt’s seed round, with participation from Haystack, Subtraction Capital, Comet Labs and various individual angel investors.

“Our fund has been searching for the most immediately useful applications of robotics, and Cobalt has found one. We look forward to seeing safer and better workplaces, served by Cobalt,” said Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta.

“Hydrogels are soft, wet, biocompatible, and can form more friendly interfaces with human organs,” says Xuanhe Zhao, associate professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT. Photo: Hyunwoo Yuk/MIT Soft Active Materials Lab

Engineers at MIT have fabricated transparent, gel-based robots that move when water is pumped in and out of them. The bots can perform a number of fast, forceful tasks, including kicking a ball underwater, and grabbing and releasing a live fish.

The robots are made entirely of hydrogel — a tough, rubbery, nearly transparent material that’s composed mostly of water. Each robot is an assemblage of hollow, precisely designed hydrogel structures, connected to rubbery tubes. When the researchers pump water into the hydrogel robots, the structures quickly inflate in orientations that enable the bots to curl up or stretch out.

The team fashioned several hydrogel robots, including a finlike structure that flaps back and forth, an articulated appendage that makes kicking motions, and a soft, hand-shaped robot that can squeeze and relax.

Because the robots are both powered by and made almost entirely of water, they have similar visual and acoustic properties to water. The researchers propose that these robots, if designed for underwater applications, may be virtually invisible.

“Hydrogels are soft, wet, biocompatible, and can form more friendly interfaces with human organs,” Zhao says. “We are actively collaborating with medical groups to translate this system into soft manipulators such as hydrogel ‘hands,’ which could potentially apply more gentle manipulations to tissues and organs in surgical operations.”

Zhao and Yuk have published their results this week in the journal Nature Communications. Their co-authors include MIT graduate students Shaoting Lin and Chu Ma, postdoc Mahdi Takaffoli, and associate professor of mechanical engineering Nicholas X. Fang.

Robot recipe

For the past five years, Zhao’s group has been developing “recipes” for hydrogels, mixing solutions of polymers and water, and using techniques they invented to fabricate tough yet highly stretchable materials. They have also developed ways to glue these hydrogels to various surfaces such as glass, metal, ceramic, and rubber, creating extremely strong bonds that resist peeling.

The team realized that such durable, flexible, strongly bondable hydrogels might be ideal materials for use in soft robotics. Many groups have designed soft robots from rubbers like silicones, but Zhao points out that such materials are not as biocompatible as hydrogels. As hydrogels are mostly composed of water, he says, they are naturally safer to use in a biomedical setting. And while others have attempted to fashion robots out of hydrogels, their solutions have resulted in brittle, relatively inflexible materials that crack or burst with repeated use.

In contrast, Zhao’s group found its formulations leant themselves well to soft robotics.

“We didn’t think of this kind of [soft robotics] project initially, but realized maybe our expertise can be crucial to translating these jellies as robust actuators and robotic structures,” Yuk says.

Fast and forceful

To apply their hydrogel materials to soft robotics, the researchers first looked to the animal world. They concentrated in particular on leptocephali, or glass eels — tiny, transparent, hydrogel-like eel larvae that hatch in the ocean and eventually migrate to their natural river habitats.

“It is extremely long travel, and there is no means of protection,” Yuk says. “It seems they tried to evolve into a transparent form as an efficient camouflage tactic. And we wanted to achieve a similar level of transparency, force, and speed.”

To do so, Yuk and Zhao used 3-D printing and laser cutting techniques to print their hydrogel recipes into robotic structures and other hollow units, which they bonded to small, rubbery tubes that are connected to external pumps.

To actuate, or move, the structures, the team used syringe pumps to inject water through the hollow structures, enabling them to quickly curl or stretch, depending on the overall configuration of the robots.

Yuk and Zhao found that by pumping water in, they could produce fast, forceful reactions, enabling a hydrogel robot to generate a few newtons of force in one second. For perspective, other researchers have activated similar hydrogel robots by simple osmosis, letting water naturally seep into structures — a slow process that creates millinewton forces over several minutes or hours.

Catch and release

In experiments using several hydrogel robot designs, the team found the structures were able to withstand repeated use of up to 1,000 cycles without rupturing or tearing. They also found that each design, placed underwater against colored backgrounds, appeared almost entirely camouflaged. The group measured the acoustic and optical properties of the hydrogel robots, and found them to be nearly equal to that of water, unlike rubber and other commonly used materials in soft robotics.

In a striking demonstration of the technology, the team fabricated a hand-like robotic gripper and pumped water in and out of its “fingers” to make the hand open and close. The researchers submerged the gripper in a tank with a goldfish and showed that as the fish swam past, the gripper was strong and fast enough to close around the fish.

“[The robot] is almost transparent, very hard to see,” Zhao says. “When you release the fish, it’s quite happy because [the robot] is soft and doesn’t damage the fish. Imagine a hard robotic hand would probably squash the fish.”

Next, the researchers plan to identify specific applications for hydrogel robotics, as well as tailor their recipes to particular uses. For example, medical applications might not require completely transparent structures, while other applications may need certain parts of a robot to be stiffer than others.

“We want to pinpoint a realistic application and optimize the material to achieve something impactful,” Yuk says. “To our best knowledge, this is the first demonstration of hydrogel pressure-based acutuation. We are now tossing this concept out as an open question, to say, ‘Let’s play with this.’”

This research was supported, in part, by the Office of Naval Research, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the National Science Foundation.

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The Harvard team’s exosuit is a wearable robot that directly targets the ankle joints and is made of functional textiles, cable-based actuation and a biologically-inspired control system. In this version, actuation, electronics and battery units (shown on the left) have been off-boarded to better allow the researchers to quantify the exosuit’s energy-saving potential in healthy wearers. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Last year, Harvard’s soft exosuit team provided first proof-of-concept results showing that its wearable robot could lower energy expenditure in healthy people walking with a load on their back. Made of functional textiles, cable-based actuation and a biologically-inspired control system, the exosuit targets specific leg joints – instead of the full leg – and delivers assistance that is synchronized with the wearer’s walking mechanics in individuals ranging from people that carry heavy loads to people that are disabled by stroke or other health complications.

The team is led by Conor Walsh, a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Founder of the Harvard Biodesign Lab.

But the question still remained. What is the effect of increasing assistance levels on the overall energy savings to wearers? These savings are the result of the energy spared due to the assistive force provided to the ankle motions, and this must be balanced with the additional energy expended by the wearer when carrying the exosuit’s mass.

Now, in a new study published as the cover article in Science Robotics, Walsh’s multidisciplinary team of roboticists, engineers, biomechanics experts and apparel designers isolated the beneficial effects of the exosuit. By removing the actuation, electronics and battery units, leaving only the exosuit’s light wearable textiles and pulling cables, the researchers were able to calculate the impact on the wearers’ joints. The study is selected as the cover article of the issue.

“In a test group of seven healthy wearers, we clearly saw that the more assistance provided to the ankle joints, the more energy the wearers could save with a maximum reduction of almost 23% compared to walking with the exosuit powered-off,” said Walsh. “To our knowledge, this is the highest relative reduction in energy expenditure observed to date with a tethered exoskeleton or exosuit.”

Interestingly, the team found that wearers significantly adapted their gait with increasing levels of assistance. The changes were most significant at the ankle joint but also at the hip as the exosuit included straps coupling the assistance from the back of the lower legs to the front of the hip in a beneficial manner.

“Other studies had reported that there can be an energy transfer between the ankle and other joints. However, by having a textile couple the ankle and hip with our soft exosuit, may have amplified this effect, contributing to the considerable energy savings we found,” said Brendan Quinlivan, a graduate student working with Walsh and one of the two first-authors on the study.

The exosuit’s soft textiles strategically position the actuating cables that assist with the ankle motion at the back of the lower legs and, through additional straps, transfer energy produced at the ankle to the front of the hip to also assist with the gait’s hip motion. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

The authors acknowledge that future studies are now required to compare the effects of fully body-worn versions of the exosuit, with the weight of the actuation and battery carried by the wearer, to walking with normal clothes to better quantify the true impact of the technology.

“This study represents another major step forward along a path that will bring this new type of ‘wearable robot’ into the marketplace where it will help soldiers and workers, as well as patients with disabilities,” said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard SEAS.“The results from this study will help us find a sweet spot between the added system weight and the amount of force applied to achieve maximum benefits in energy expenditure in wearers. Defining these interdependencies in healthy people will ultimately also help us design versions suitable for people with gait abnormalities,” said Sangjun Lee, who also is a graduate student in Walsh’s team and a co-first author of the study.

The multi-disciplinary study was supported by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Warrior Web Program, the National Science Foundation, a Samsung Scholarship, the São Paulo Research Foundation and the Robert Bosch Stiftung.

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By Jurjen Slump.

Students of Delft University of Technology have developed a new add-on for a 3D printer that can cast silicones inside a 3D printed shell during the printing process. This new, and cheap, technique can be used to create new soft-robotic products that were previously impossible to make. The team presented their findings yesterday, at the science fair that marked the end of the minor Advanced Prototyping of the faculty Industrial Design Engineering.

The technique they developed is called UltiCast. “It is a combination of moulding and 3D printing”, explains Max Nobel, student Industrial Design Engineering. “The machine makes a plastic shell, which is filled with 2-components silicones at the same time.” The shell is made of a plastic (PVA) which dissolves in water. The team uses a Ultimaker 3D printer, which they completely rebuilt.

UltiCasting will allow more complex shapes that could not be printed on a ‘traditional’ direct drive 3D printer. If the mould quality is high, the surface quality of the flexible silicon will also be very high. This is very hard to achieve in traditional fused deposition modelling (FDM) printing, because every layer of hot filament deforms the previous layers of filament.

Soft robotics
The new technique proves very interesting for soft robotics. With UltiCasting it becomes possible to ‘print’ a soft actuator in a mould, thereby elimination the manual casting process and doing so speeding up the process of creating soft actuators. “You get a lot of freedom to personalise the behaviour of robots with geometry and materials”, tells team member Rob Scharff, a PhD student in soft robotics.

“You get a lot of freedom to personalise the behaviour of robots with geometry and materials”

It is mechanical intelligence. “You make sure that the robot behaves exactly as you want to.” For example, you can make a robot hand with flexible fingers and a thumb that has enough strength to pick up a vegetable. “With 3D printing, you can fabricate a custom-made gripper.” Besides, it has the potential to mix hard materials – as another team proved – making it possible to print a skeleton inside silicone. “You can use various materials during printing. The results are much more complex materials.”

The new application is cheap as well: the setup the students made cost about €3000, says Scharff. Other complex multi-material 3D printing systems cost around €300,000. “That’s a big difference.”

Medical sector
In the field of soft robotics, cheap 3D printing can prove valuable for several applications. This could be the case in the medical sector, especially with aided movement. “Reducing the cost of treatment and support utilities is a goal that inspires us all. Soft robotics could, in the long term, be a big player in this progress”, the team states.

“Reducing the cost of treatment and support utilities is a goal that inspires us all”

Therefore, they developed a 3D printed glove with soft robotics actuators to help move your fingers. This glove could be used to assist people with arthritis, local paralysis, limited hand function or as supporting tool in rehabilitation. The goal of the team is not to create a finished product, however, but rather to give a proof of concept showing the possibilities of 3D printing for soft robotics.

Digital fabrication

“3D printing offers a variety of applications, being soft robotics one of them”, tells coordinator Jouke Verlinden. “It allows you to make things that are impossible with traditional robotics. Soft robotics is a research theme in which we invest a lot.”

At the science fair, other student- projects were on display as well. At first sight, some of them don’t seem to be related with robotics. Others are. But don’t be mistaken! “It is all part of digital fabrication. Project Michelangelo is clearly a robot, but the Hololens at the museum has a lot to do with robotics as well. It is all about image recognition, and in the basis, they work with the same algorithms as the ones that are being used for robotic visioning.”

This article was originally posted on RoboValley.

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A group from Floreano Lab, EPFL and NCCR Robotics has today published their novel variable stiffness fibre with self-healing capability.

Soft “hardware” components are becoming more and more popular solutions within the field of robotics. In fact softness, compliance and foldability bring significant advantages to devices by allowing conformability and safe interactions with users, objects and unstructured environments. However for some applications, the softness of components adversely reduces the range of forces those devices can apply or sustain. An optimal solution would be having components able to vary their softness according to the needed task.

The fibre has a metal core, consisting of low melting point alloys (LMPA), which is contained within a pre-stretched silicone tube. At room temperatures the LMPA is a solid, thus, the fibre is stiff and behaves like a thin metal wire. But when an electrical current is passed through a copper wire coiled around the tube, the LMPA inner core is warmed above 62 ^oC and melts, thus, the fibre becomes up to 700 times softer and 400 times more deformable.

The second advantage is that if the metallic core breaks it just needs to be heated and — voila! The fibre is fixed! And to top it off, the changing of states occurs in tens of seconds (depending on the current injected and the dimension of the LMPA core).

The fibre has a myriad of real-world applications in the fields of mobile robots, wearable devices and soft systems. Currently, the team is using the fibre to create multi-purpose foldable drones. In fact, the fibre can be morphed into different shapes that are preserved after cooling, ie the four arms of the drone can take different functional morphologies, i.e. deployed in a quadrotor-like configuration for aerial locomotion or bent towards the ground in a four-wheeled configuration for terrestrial locomotion.

Future applications that the team is investigating include in endoscopes and other medical applications, where instruments need to be soft and pliable as they are exploring delicate body cavities, but then need to be able to penetrate resistive biological tissues (e.g. for a biopsy) once they have reached their desired location.

Reference

Tonazzini, A., Mintchev, S., Schubert, B., Mazzolai, B., Shintake, J. and Floreano, D. (2016), Variable Stiffness Fiber with Self-Healing Capability. Adv. Mater.. doi:10.1002/adma.201602580

The octobot is powered by a chemical reaction and controlled with a soft logic board. A reaction inside the bot transforms a small amount of liquid fuel (hydrogen peroxide) into a large amount of gas, which flows into the octobot’s arms and inflates them like a balloon. A microfluidic logic circuit, a soft analog of a simple electronic oscillator, controls when hydrogen peroxide decomposes to gas in the octobot. Image credit: Lori Sanders/HarvardSEAS

By: Leah Burrows

A team of Harvard University researchers with expertise in 3D printing, mechanical engineering, and microfluidics has demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot. This small, 3D-printed robot — nicknamed the octobot — could pave the way for a new generation of completely soft, autonomous machines.

Soft robotics could revolutionize how humans interact with machines. But researchers have struggled to build entirely compliant robots. Electric power and control systems — such as batteries and circuit boards — are rigid and until now soft-bodied robots have been either tethered to an off-board system or rigged with hard components.

Robert Wood, the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Jennifer A. Lewis, the Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) led the research. Lewis and Wood are also core faculty members of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

“One long-standing vision for the field of soft robotics has been to create robots that are entirely soft, but the struggle has always been in replacing rigid components like batteries and electronic controls with analogous soft systems and then putting it all together,” said Wood. “This research demonstrates that we can easily manufacture the key components of a simple, entirely soft robot, which lays the foundation for more complex designs.”

The research is described in the journal Nature.

“Through our hybrid assembly approach, we were able to 3D print each of the functional components required within the soft robot body, including the fuel storage, power and actuation, in a rapid manner,” said Lewis. “The octobot is a simple embodiment designed to demonstrate our integrated design and additive fabrication strategy for embedding autonomous functionality.”

Octopuses have long been a source of inspiration in soft robotics. These curious creatures can perform incredible feats of strength and dexterity with no internal skeleton.

Harvard’s octobot is pneumatic-based — powered by gas under pressure.  A reaction inside the bot transforms a small amount of liquid fuel (hydrogen peroxide) into a large amount of gas, which flows into the octobot’s arms and inflates them like a balloon.

“Fuel sources for soft robots have always relied on some type of rigid components,” said Michael Wehner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Wood lab and co-first author of the paper. “The wonderful thing about hydrogen peroxide is that a simple reaction between the chemical and a catalyst — in this case platinum — allows us to replace rigid power sources.”

To control the reaction, the team used a microfluidic logic circuit based on pioneering work by co-author and chemist George Whitesides, the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor and core faculty member of the Wyss. The circuit, a soft analog of a simple electronic oscillator, controls when hydrogen peroxide decomposes to gas in the octobot.

The octobot, here with fluorescently dyed fugitive inks (red) and hyperelastic actuator layers (blue), is fabricated by moulding and 3D printing. Image courtesy: Lori Sanders/Harvard SEAS

“The entire system is simple to fabricate, by combining three fabrication methods — soft lithography, molding and 3D printing — we can quickly manufacture these devices,” said Ryan Truby, a graduate student in the Lewis lab and co-first author of the paper.

The simplicity of the assembly process paves the way for more complex designs. Next, the Harvard team hopes to design an octobot that can crawl, swim and interact with its environment.

“This research is a proof of concept,” Truby said. “We hope that our approach for creating autonomous soft robots inspires roboticists, material scientists and researchers focused on advanced manufacturing,”

The paper was co-authored by Daniel Fitzgerald of the Wyss Institute and Bobak  Mosadegh, of Cornell University.  The research was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Harvard and by the Wyss Institute.

Visit the new Harvard Robotics website to learn more about robotics at Harvard.

Research reference:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v536/n7617/full/nature19100.html

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Caterpillar micro-robot sitting on a finger tip.
Credit: Source: FUW

Researchers at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, using the liquid crystal elastomer technology, originally developed in the LENS Institute in Florence, demonstrated a bioinspired micro-robot capable of mimicking caterpillar gaits in natural scale. The 15-millimeter long soft robot harvests energy from green light and is controlled by spatially modulated laser beam. Apart from travelling on flat surfaces, it can also climb slopes, squeeze through narrow slits and transport loads.

Supersuit in the future? Source: Bigstockphoto

Children with a rare neurological disease were recently given the chance to walk for the first time thanks to a new robotic exoskeleton. These devices – which are essentially robotic suits that give artificial movement to a user’s limbs – are set to become an increasingly common way of helping people who’ve lost the use of their legs to walk. But while today’s exoskeletons are mostly clumsy, heavy devices, new technology could make them much easier and more natural to use by creating a robotic skin.

Exoskeletons have been in development since the 1960s. The first one was a bulky set of legs and claw-like gloves reminiscent of the superhero, Iron Man, designed to use hydraulic power to help industrial workers lift hundreds of kilogrammes of weight. It didn’t work, but since then other designs for both the upper and lower body have successfully been used to increase people’s strength, help teach them to use their limbs again, or even as a way to interact with computers using touch or “haptic” feedback.

These devices usually consist of a chain of links and powered joints that align with the user’s own bones and joints. The links are strapped securely to the user’s limbs and when the powered joints are activated they cause their joints to flex. Control of the exoskeleton can be performed by a computer – for example if it is performing a physiotherapy routine – or by monitoring the electrical activity in the user’s muscles and then amplifying the force they are creating.

Heavy and painful

But despite half a century of research, exoskeletons still aren’t widely used. This is largely because they are usually very uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time, as individuals’ bodies differ from the one-size-fits-all structure of the suits. Some exoskeletons are designed to be adjusted to fit a user’s body better, but if the robotic joints and the user’s real joints don’t rotate in exactly the same position it can produce unnatural motion, causing discomfort or pain. This is made worse by the stiffness of each part of the suit.

Another problem, especially with upper-body exoskeletons, is how heavy they are, usually because of the strong materials needed to support the body weight and the powerful actuators that move the joints. Current suits also aren’t designed to cope with temperature changes or rain, which makes them difficult to use in the real world. And their appearance, which hasn’t been a primary concern of designers so far, can put people off.

Prototype soft exoskeleton glove. Source: Steve Davis.

To make exoskeletons more practical and appealing, we need innovations to make them more like a “second skin” than a giant robotic suit. Exoskeletons typically use heavy electric motors, but lightweight actuators such as pneumatic muscles are now being considered. These can produce similar forces to electric motors but at a fraction of the weight. The muscles consist of a rubber bladder surrounded by a woven sleeve. When pressurised, they increase in diameter and contract in length, pulling the joint. They are made from lightweight materials but can generate the force needed to lift many hundreds of kilogrammes.

Soft robotics

However, even these lightweight actuators still need to be attached to a rigid mechanical structure mounted to the user’s body. Myself and my colleagues at the University of Salford’s Centre for Autonomous Systems and Robotics are developing another alternative: soft robotics. This technology uses physically soft advanced materials to carry out similar tasks to traditional rigid robotic devices. They are particularly well suited to interaction with humans as they are typically lightweight which means if they collide with a person they are unlikely to cause injury.

We recently developed a new “soft continuum actuator”, a joint that bends like an elephant’s trunk. Unlike a traditional rigid robot joint, if it encounters resistance in one part of its body it will still bend but at a different location elsewhere along its length.

By equipping a skintight material suit with these actuators, we can create a soft exoskeleton that bends at the precise location of the wearer’s joints. This means the suit will fit a range of users comfortably without needing mechanical adjustment or calibration. Plus, the system is lightweight and can be worn like clothing rather than a bulky mechanical frame.

Exoskeletons are now starting to be sold commercially and we’ll probably see more of them in the coming years. In 2012, paralysed woman Claire Lomas even completed the London Marathon wearing one. But there are still significant engineering challenges to be addressed before we will see widespread use of these systems. For one thing, we need a way for people to power the suits without having to plug themselves in every half an hour.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A small 3-D printed ionic polymer-metal composite soft robotic hand. National Science Foundation researchers are working to transform this material into artificial muscles. Credit: Kam K. Leang. University of Utah

Forget steel and aluminum. The robots of tomorrow may be able to squish, stretch and squeeze.

Novel robotic devices, part of the emerging field of soft robotics, offer many advances over conventional robots. Soft robots can more easily maneuver in tough spaces. They can better interact with humans, making them excellent assistants for elderly people. And one day they may lead to high-tech artificial muscles: a life-changing innovation for millions of disabled people around the globe.

James Carrico, a Ph.D. graduate student at the University of Utah, displaying a small 3-D printed ionic polymer-metal composite soft robotic hand. Credit: Kam K. Leang

Creating artificial muscles requires not only developing a powerful, flexible material, but figuring out how to precisely control and cleverly manufacture it. That’s the mission of Kwang Kim of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and his National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded team.

Kim is lead investigator on a NSF award pairing a diverse group of researchers — at four U.S. universities plus research institutions in Japan and South Korea — to transform a novel polymer-based material into artificial muscles. The research is supported through NSF’s Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) program, which supports innovative, global research collaborations across all fields of science and engineering.

PIRE leverages U.S. funding and expertise to tackle global challenges. Kim’s U.S. team is working with researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, both known for strong expertise in robotics. (KAIST, for example, won the recent Robotics Challenge, hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)

One of the big challenges in soft robotics is finding the right material. “It has to be soft, but it also has to produce enough power to do lots of different things,” Kim said. His team is using a type of synthetic material called Ionic Polymer-Metal Composites, which is a kind of electroactive polymer — meaning running electricity through the material makes it change shape.

The PIRE award will work to transform electroactive polymers, a type of material that changes shape when electricity runs through it, into artificial muscles. Credit: Kwang J. Kim, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Kam K. Leang, University of Utah (both formerly of University of Nevada, Reno)

“In robotics you’ve got to be able to move and you’ve got to be able to sense,” said Kam Leang, an associate professor at the University of Utah Robotics Center and a co-investigator on this project. Traditional robots use electric motors to do the former. “In this PIRE, we are using the electroactive polymer itself.”

Electroactive polymers can also be used to sense motion, making them a great candidate for soft robotics. Leang and his colleagues have also devised a way to 3-D print the material. His component of the PIRE research is focused on how to scale up the manufacturing, as well as devising ways to better control the motion of the polymer. Others are working to better understand — and improve — the polymer material to make it more responsive, strong and affordable.

The project, which received NSF funding last fall, is still in its early stages. Kim, who has been working in electroactive polymers for nearly two decades, said soft robotics itself is still a relatively new field.

“I’m learning every day.”

Investigators: Paul Oh, Kam Leang, Kwang Kim, Chulsung Bae, Maurizio Porfiri

Related Institutions/Organizations: New York University, The University of Utah, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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This 3-D hexapod robot moves via a single motor, which spins a crankshaft that pumps fluid to the robot’s legs. Besides the motor and battery, every component is printed in a single step with no assembly required. Among the robot’s key parts are several sets of “bellows” 3-D printed directly into its body. To propel the robot, the bellows uses fluid pressure that is translated into a mechanical force. (As an alternative to the bellows, the team also demonstrated they could 3-D print a gear pump that can produce continuous fluid flow.)
Photo: Robert MacCurdy/MIT CSAIL

By Adam Conner-Simons | CSAIL

One reason we don’t yet have robot personal assistants buzzing around doing our chores is because making them is hard. Assembling robots by hand is time-consuming, while automation — robots building other robots — is not yet fine-tuned enough to make robots that can do complex tasks.

But if humans and robots can’t do the trick, what about 3-D printers?

In a new paper, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) present the first-ever technique for 3-D printing robots that involves printing solid and liquid materials at the same time.

The new method allows the team to automatically 3-D print dynamic robots in a single step, with no assembly required, using a commercially-available 3-D printer.

“Our approach, which we call ‘printable hydraulics,’ is a step towards the rapid fabrication of functional machines,” says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, who oversaw the project and co-wrote the paper. “All you have to do is stick in a battery and motor, and you have a robot that can practically walk right out of the printer.”

To demonstrate the concept, researchers 3-D printed a tiny six-legged robot that can crawl via 12 hydraulic pumps embedded within its body. They also 3-D printed robotic parts that can be used on existing platforms, such as a soft rubber hand for the Baxter research robot.

The paper, which was recently accepted to this summer’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), was co-written by MIT postdoc Robert MacCurdy and PhD candidate Robert Katzschmann, as well as Harvard University undergraduate Youbin Kim.

The printing process

For all of the progress in 3-D printing, liquids continue to be a big hurdle. Printing liquids is a messy process, which means that most approaches require an additional post-printing step such as melting it away or having a human manually scrape it clean. That step makes it hard for liquid-based methods to be employed for factory-scale manufacturing.

The team’s method of printing solid and liquid materials simultaneously allows them to create robotic structures that can be hydraulically powered.
Photo: Robert MacCurdy/MIT CSAIL

With “printable hydraulics,” an inkjet printer deposits individual droplets of material that are each 20 to 30 microns in diameter, or less than half the width of a human hair. The printer proceeds layer-by-layer from the bottom up. For each layer, the printer deposits different materials in different parts, and then uses high-intensity UV light to solidify all of the materials (minus, of course, the liquids). The printer uses multiple materials, though at a more basic level each layer consist of a “photopolymer,” which is a solid, and “a non-curing material,” which is a liquid.

“Inkjet printing lets us have eight different print-heads deposit different materials adjacent to one another, all at the same time,” MacCurdy says. “It gives us very fine control of material placement, which is what allows us to print complex, pre-filled fluidic channels.”

Another challenge with 3-D printing liquids is that they often interfere with the droplets that are supposed to solidify. To handle that issue, the team printed dozens of test geometries with different orientations to determine the proper resolutions for printing solids and liquids together.

While it’s a painstaking process, MacCurdy says that printing both liquids and solids is even more difficult with other 3-D printing methods, such as fused-deposition modeling and laser-sintering.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “inkjet-printing is currently the best way to print multiple materials.”

The results

To demonstrate their method, researchers 3-D printed a small hexapod robot that weighs about 1.5 pounds and is less than 6 inches long. To move, a single DC motor spins a crankshaft that pumps fluid to the robot’s legs. Aside from its motor and power supply, every component is printed in a single step with no assembly required.

Among the robot’s key parts are several set of “bellows” that are 3-D printed directly into its body. To propel the robot, the bellows uses fluid pressure that is then translated into a mechanical force. (As an alternative to the bellows, the team also demonstrated they could 3-D print a gear pump that can produce continuous fluid flow.)

Photo: Robert MacCurdy/MIT CSAIL

Lastly, the team 3-D printed a silicone-rubber robotic hand with fluid-actuated fingers. This “soft gripper” was developed for Baxter, a robot that was designed by former CSAIL director Rodney Brooks as part of his spinoff company Rethink Robotics.

“The CSAIL team has taken multi-material printing to the next level by printing not just a combination of different polymers or a mixture of metals, but essentially a self-contained working hydraulic system,” says Hod Lipson, a professor of engineering at Columbia University and co-author of “Fabricated: The New World of 3-D Printing.” “It’s an important step towards the next big phase of 3-D printing — moving from printing passive parts to printing active integrated systems.”

Compatible with any multimaterial 3-D inkjet printer, “printable hydraulics” allows for a customizable design template that can create robots of different sizes, shapes and functions.

“If you have a crawling robot that you want to have step over something larger, you can tweak the design in a matter of minutes,” MacCurdy says. “In the future, the system will hardly need any human input at all; you can just press a few buttons, and it will automatically make the changes.”

MacCurdy envisions many potential applications, including disaster relief in dangerous environments. Many nuclear sites, for example, need to be remediated to reduce their radiation levels. Unfortunately, the sites are not only lethal to humans, but radioactive enough to destroy conventional electronics.

“Printable robots like these can be quickly, cheaply fabricated, with fewer electronic components than traditional robots,” MacCurdy says.

Looking ahead

The team is eager to further build on their work. While the hexapod’s 22-hour print-time is relatively short for its complexity, researchers say that future hardware advances would improve the speed.

“Accelerating the process depends less on the particulars of our technique, and more on the engineering and resolution of the printers themselves,” says Rus, the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. “Printing ultimately takes as long as the printer takes, so as printers improve, so will the manufacturing capabilities.”

This isn’t Rus’ group’s first foray into 3-D printed robots. This past fall her team developed a similar gripper, while in 2014 they created an arm that can snake through a pipe and grasp an object. But where these projects still required multiple non-3-D printed objects, “printable hydraulics” gets even closer to printing all components in one step.

“Building robots doesn’t have to be as time-consuming and labor-intensive as it’s been in the past,” Rus says. “3-D printing offers a way forward, allowing us to automatically produce complex, functional, hydraulically-powered robots that can be put to immediate use.”

Read the research here

The team’s work was funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Entrants in the Soft Robotics Competitions use the intellectual resources provided in the Soft Robotics Toolkit to design and build their own soft robots. (Photo by Eliza Grinnell/SEAS Communications.)

By Adam Zewe | SEAS

If you have a soft spot for robotics, this competition is right up your alley. With separate tracks for academic researchers, college students, and high school students, the 2016 Soft Robotics Competition offers anyone with an interest in robotics the chance to design and build their own soft robot using the resources available in the open-source Soft Robotics Toolkit.

Now in its second year, the competition was developed by Conor Walsh, assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Dónal Holland, visiting lecturer in engineering sciences, as a way to encourage individuals to take advantage of the resources provided in the Soft Robotics Toolkit.

Further reading:

 

Robots Podcast #180: Soft Robotics Toolkit, with Donal Holland

Interview with Soft Robotics’ Carl Vause

The real soft robots that inspired Baymax, with Chris Atkeson

Morphological computation: The hidden superpower of soft-bodied robots

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The toolkit, which incorporates contributions from researchers from Harvard and other institutions, provides a set of intellectual tools that one can use to design and construct a robot using soft, flexible materials. It includes resources such as step-by-step instructions on building actuators and sensors, lists of suggested materials, and how-to fabrication videos.

The ultimate goal of the competition is to encourage others to find innovative applications for soft robotics technology and continue expanding interest in this relatively new field.

“Last year, we were really impressed with the variety and quality of entries,” Holland said. “The participants came up with fantastic ideas that we never would have thought of, and we hope that this year we will receive even more submissions.”

The inaugural contest, which drew 87 initial entries from around the world, has been expanded to include separate categories for academic researchers, college students, and high school students.

Last year, some of the most unique entries were submitted by high school students, such as a wearable glove that detects and controls tremor, and a teddy bear that hugs back. Since many high school students don’t have access to 3D printers and other high-tech equipment commonly found on university campuses, organizers established a separate high school category this year, explained research fellow Max Herman.

“We hope this will enable even more people to participate this year,” he said. “Our goal is to lower the barrier of entry into the area of soft robotics.”

Entries in the high school and college competitions must be novel and should incorporate at least one component technology from the Soft Robotics Toolkit website. Students will document their projects using a “wiki” that includes at least four sections: background, design, fabrication, and testing.

Entrants in the academic research competition must submit work that has either been published or accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal or conference proceeding. In addition, entrants must provide details of the research on the Soft Robotics Toolkit website before June, with a focus on replicable processes. The quality of the documentation will be a factor in the judging process.

The competition opens in January and entries will be accepted through June. There is no cost to enter the competition and prizes will be awarded to the developers of the top projects in all three categories. Winning projects will also be featured on the Soft Robotics Toolkit website.

Click here for detailed information about competition rules, eligibility, and entry guidelines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbLF_gp9RkI

Source: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

In the Disruptive Podcast series, Terrence McNally speaks directly with Wyss Institute researchers, exploring what motivates them and how they envision our future as might be impacted by their disruptive technologies. In part 2 of the Disruptive: Bioinspired Robotics episode, Wyss Founding Core Faculty Member Robert Wood discusses new manufacturing techniques that are enabling popup and soft robots.

Wood is developing biologically inspired aerial and terrestrial microrobots, soft-bodied robots, and “printable” robots. His current research interests include new micro- and meso-scale manufacturing techniques, fluid mechanics of low Reynolds number flapping wings, control of sensor-limited and computation-limited systems, active soft materials, and morphable soft-bodied robots. He leads a team of over 40 researchers on the National Science Foundation (NSF) “RoboBees” project to develop coordinated colonies of autonomous robotic bees.

His group is also building agile ambulatory robots that are inspired by insects and centipedes. The long-term goal is to create a swarm of robotic insects capable of performing important tasks, such as search and rescue, hazardous environmental explorations, and pollination. Wood is collaborating with a diverse set of researchers at the Wyss who are exploring soft-bodied autonomous robots and soft devices for human-robot interaction and rehabilitation. One of these projects, called “Second Skin,” is a system in which sensing, actuation, and control mechanisms are embedded in soft devices that can be worn by patients with neuromuscular disorders to help them regain function. Wood is also working on novel manufacturing processes for “printable robots” with the goal of automating robot development and creating new methods for rapid prototyping complex electromechanical devices.

The Jaeger-Lipson coffee balloon gripper. Its soft end effector adapts itself to the object it grasps. Source: John Amend

Soft robots are versatile, often much safer, more energy-efficient, robust and resilient than their more rigid counterparts. But one of the biggest challenges facing soft robotics is control – often, classical approaches don’t apply. The answer may lie in morphological computation, an idea that stems from biological systems using their bodies to control basic actions.

Industrial Networking and Engagement Day on Soft Technologies

Explore the possibilities of soft technologies and soft robotics in your field!

October 8, 2015
Bristol, UK

Novel designs in soft robotics reference simplicity as well as versatility. The Jaeger-Lipson coffee-balloon gripper is one example. Essentially a balloon, it’s filled with ground coffee and can be either soft or hard depending on the air pressure within it. It can grasp objects using a simple one-dimensional control variable (switching the vacuum on or off). By exploiting its soft morphology, the end effector adapts itself to the object without the need for any explicit modelling or control.

Morphological computation proposes that at least some aspects of control (such as walking or grasping) can be outsourced to the body as these functions are already “encoded” within it. Another way to see it is that the body can be exploited as a computational resource. This makes a task much easier, since part of the “work” will already have been done by the body, reducing the complexity of the robot’s computational problems and the corresponding control and learning tasks.

The soft body of the octopus has potential as a computational resource.

So what kind of computation can we carry out in the physical bodies of robots? Biological systems have to take sensory information and interpret or transform it into sensible actuation signals. The computational process is a dynamic mapping of continuous input streams onto output streams, with a feedback loop through the environment. This could be, for example, a nonlinear controller that is implemented in the morphology to stabilize running – a controller is nothing other than a dynamical system, after all. In the case of morphological computation, this system is simply part of the body instead of an algorithm in some external, digital computational unit.

Fundamentally different from digital computing processes, morphological computation is not based on a Turing machine with discrete steps and finite time; it takes place in the continuous, analogue realm and is carried out directly in the body.

It can also be broadened out beyond the shape and form of body parts, into parameters that describe its dynamics, such as stiffness, friction, or damping. The dynamic parameters of the environment also shape the type of computation. For example, a compliant leg interacts with the ground (when it impacts), and a soft hand deforms by grasping an object.

Some background

Asimo has rigid body parts. While it is an ingenious piece of hardware, its body is not useful for morphological computation.

Recent studies in morphological computation [1][2] suggest that a computationally powerful body needs to exhibit highly complex dynamics (i.e. high-dimensional state space, nonlinearities and under-actuation). But in most classical robot designs, such as the Asmio robot and many industrial robots, these properties are deliberately suppressed as complex dynamics can interfere with modelling and control.

The concept of morphological computation has been widely used in robotics for some time now. Some nice examples are listed by Pfeifer and Bongard in their influential book “How the body shapes the way we think” [3].

Many of these robots were built using a combination of bio-inspiration, intuition, and clever engineering. Until recently, there were no clear guidelines for their design.

To fill this gap, we developed two theoretical, mathematical models [1],[2] that attempt to describe how bodies can be exploited as computational resources. In order to provide a descriptive generic model, we used networks of simple mass-spring damper systems – a good approximation for biological, but also soft, robotic bodies.

Caption: (a) The Cornell passive dynamic walker (Collins et al., 2001); (b) Wanda by Ziegler et al., 2006; (c) Puppy and (d) Stumpy by Fumiya Iida (Source: Iida and Pfeifer, 2004)

The underlying idea is to use morphology as a computational resource to emulate complex behaviours. The range of possible computation is impressive. Theoretically, there are almost no limits.

We were able to show that physical bodies can be used to emulate complex nonlinear differential equations (e.g. nonlinear controllers). We demonstrated setups to emulate nonlinear limit cycles that are highly robust and are even able to generalize beyond their learned data sets. Such limit cycles can be used to produce a control signal for locomotion. We were even able to demonstrate the use of the body as a switch between different limit cycles (behaviours) based on physical inputs (forces applied to the system) that could come from the environment. The implications are that the body can also serve as a type of sensor, enabling the robot to sense change through its soft body and react appropriately.

One possible application could be a robot that is able to “feel” the weight on its body, enabling it to adapt its locomotion by producing (computing) different limit cycles accordingly.

A robot that is able to “feel” the weight on its body and react appropriately by producing different limit cycles depending on the situation. Source: Hauser, H and Füchslin. RM and Nakajima, K. [4]

Building real robots

Theoretical results aside, a number of real-world platforms have exploited soft complex bodies as a computational resource. For example, in the EU project OCTOPUS we showed that a passive silicone arm (inspired by the octopus) can be used to carry out complex computational tasks [5 and 6].

Caption: (a) Passive soft silicone arm from [6]; (b) modular pneumatically driven robot arm, by TUM; (c) Kitty, a robot with compliant spine [7] (d) NASA’s superball robot [8]

We built a quadruped robot with compliant spine that we used as a computational resource to control its locomotion [7]. We also demonstrated, in a more industrial setting, that a modular, pneumatically-driven robot arm (developed at TU Munich by Martin Eder) can be exploited via morphological computation [paper close to submission]. Another example is NASA’s tensegrity robot “SuperBallBot,” with applications in exo-planetary exploration [8].

Implications and outlook

Morphological computation provides us with a new viewpoint: instead of perceiving their complex dynamics as a problem, we can instead embrace and exploit this hidden superpower of soft bodies. There are some interesting implications:

• Soft robots can exploit their bodies for computational tasks that can make them more robust, faster (they respond in real time) and, potentially, more energy efficient than their hard counterparts, as they work with rather than against their body dynamics.
• The addition of smart materials enables body parts to take over not only actuation, but also the task of sensing the environment and processing this information. This may even extend to situations where parts of the robot break down, resulting in highly resilient, adaptive and intelligent machines.
• A morphological computation approach will allow us to design robots that can easily switch from one behaviour to another. For example: from a stable limit cycle (during locomotion) to an exponentially stable equilibrium point (for a reaching task), e.g. [10].
• The concept can be applied to a range of intelligent structures. For example: smart furniture that adapts to the movement of its user, haptic interfaces and wearable soft devices for rehabilitation or teaching novel movements (e.g. a new sport). Even smart architecture that reacts to environmental changes.
• In the future, self-assembling systems could also exploit morphological computation. Since the morphology defines the function/computation, by changing the morphology, we can “reprogram” the machine.

Because of their complex dynamics, soft robots potentially have a more computationally powerful body than rigid robots. Morphological computation turns the complexity, which has been perceived as a disadvantage in robotics, into a powerful benefit. Looking at the work done so far, we believe there is great potential for other applications and novel ideas and we are looking forward to the future.

Want to learn more about soft robotics? Come to the  Industrial Networking and Engagement Day on Soft Technologies on October 8, 2015 in Bristol, UK. This is event is geared toward people from the private sector who want to explore the possibilities of soft technologies and soft robotics in their field.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in Helmut Hauser’s presentation on Morphological Computation at the ShanghAI Lectures 2013. You may also enjoy:

• Soft robotics for adaptive building facades
• Two new soft robotics competitions announced by Soft Robotics Toolkit
• Robots Podcast: Soft Robotics Toolkit, with Donal Holland
• Robot Startup Series #7: Interview with Soft Robotics’ Carl Vause
•  Soft robotics in space

References

[1] Hauser, H.; Ijspeert, A.; Füchslin, R.; Pfeifer, R. & Maass, W. “Towards a theoretical foundation for morphological computation with compliant bodies” Biological Cybernetics, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2011, 105, 355-370 http://www.springerlink.com/content/j236312507300638/

[2] Hauser, H.; Ijspeert, A.; Füchslin, R.; Pfeifer, R. & Maass, W. “The role of feedback in morphological computation with compliant bodies” Biological Cybernetics, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2012, 106, 595-613 http://www.springerlink.com/content/d54t39qh28561271/

[3] Pfeifer, R. and Bongard J. “How the body shapes the way we think: a new view of intelligence” MIT press, 2006.

[4] Hauser, H and Füchslin. R.M. and Nakajima, K. “Morphological Computation – The Physical Body as Computational Resource” in e-book on “Opinions and Outlooks on Morphological Computation”, Chapter 20,
ISBN 978-3-033-04515-6, 2014, – http://tinyurl.com/pjvey43

[5] Nakajima K.; Li T.; Hauser H.; and Pfeifer R. “Exploiting short-term memory in soft body dynamics as a computational resource” Journal Royal Society Interface, 6 November, 2014, vol. 11, no. 100, 20140437 – DOI: 10.1098/ rsif.2014.0437 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/100/20140437.short

[6] Nakajima, Kohei, Helmut Hauser, Tao Li, and Rolf Pfeifer. “Information processing via physical soft body” Scientific Reports 5 (2015) Article number: 10487, doi:10.1038/srep10487 http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150527/srep10487/full/srep10487.html

[7] Q. Zhao, K. Nakajima, H. Sumioka, H. Hauser, and R. Pfeifer “Spine Dynamics as a Computational Resource in Spine-Driven Quadruped Locomotion”  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2013), 1445 – 1451, 2013

[8] Caluwaerts, Ken, et al. “Design and control of compliant tensegrity robots through simulation and hardware validation.” Journal of The Royal Society Interface 11.98 (2014): 20140520 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/98/20140520

[9] McEvoy, M. A., and N. Correll. “Materials that couple sensing, actuation, computation, and communication.” Science 347.6228 (2015): 1261689.

[10] “, F. Corucci, M. Calisti, H. Hauser, and C. Laschi “Novelty-based evolutionary design of underwater morphing robots” International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2015) [accepted]

[11] Hermans, Michiel, et al. “Trainable hardware for dynamical computing using error backpropagation through physical media.” Nature Communications 6 (2015).

The adaptive solar façade is assembled on the south side of the House of Natural Resources. (Photo: Marco Carocari)

By Arno Schlüter
Today, building envelopes tend to be static and unable to adapt to changing conditions. Now, for the first time, an adaptable façade has been used for the newly inaugurated House of Natural Resources (HoNR) that produces electricity and regulates light and heat generation.

The envelope of a building is of great importance to its energy balance, and insulation and air-tightness have improved significantly in recent years. But there is also significant untapped potential when it comes to contributing to the transition of our energy system towards renewable energy sources: the building envelope of a building, particularly the façade, can be designed to recover heat and generate electricity.

From rigid to dynamic structures

As the boundary between interior and exterior spaces, the façade influences the air, light and heat balance of a building significantly – and thus has a direct impact on the comfort of users. Both spaces are stochastic by nature: they change constantly and conditions are at best only vaguely predictable. And yet the envelope of a building is usually static, focusing on only one or just a few different situations. Today’s building envelope is rarely adaptable to changes in weather or the use of a room. This considerable potential for energy conservation and generation, as well as improved comfort, remains unused.

At the Chair of Architecture and Building Systems, we are researching approaches to make the building envelope more dynamic, efficient and adaptive. One example is the adaptive solar façade, which consists of individual modules mounted on a cable network on the façade. By adjusting the amount of solar radiation through the window, they can control the light and heat of the internal space and at the same time produce electricity through highly efficient thin-film solar cell modules. The adaptive solar façade is also very lightweight, so in contrast to traditional photovoltaic panels it can be mounted almost anywhere, including on existing buildings.

Soft robotics for adaptability

The soft actuator can move the module. (Photo: Professorship of Architecture and Building Systems)

The modules are moveable thanks to a new device, the soft robotic actuator, which originates from a new and promising field of robotics, soft robotics. It is made of flexible materials that take multiple forms when the pressure in the special chambers change. Such actuators are normally used mainly for prosthetic and biomimetic robots; we are now exploring and developing them for future energy and climate systems in buildings.

Our soft actuator is manufactured with a specially developed hollow casting process and the chamber is then filled with air. Valves control the air flow by pumping or releasing air to deform the actuator and thus move the solar element selectively. With soft actuators, we can control each adaptive solar façade module individually and rotate it on two axes, either on its own or in groups. This enables the modules to track the sun’s movement and generate power, use or limit solar power, create privacy or open up the view. An intelligent and adaptive regulator allows the façade to adapt to changing weather conditions and the habits and wishes of the user.

Prototype at the House of Natural Resources

A view of the adaptive solar façade from inside the building. (Photo: Marco Carocari)

Without soft actuators, such functionality would be possible only through a complex combination of several mechanical parts. These would be less durable and more expensive – making it unlikely that they would achieve widespread use in façades. In contrast, our actuator costs only a few francs when produced industrially. The soft actuator has been proven to be robust in cyclic tests in the laboratory; now it has to prove that it is just as effective in the harsh conditions of a building façade. To test this, along with various other factors, we have assembled a prototype façade of 50 modules on the south side of the House of Natural Resources (HoNR).

The module uses highly efficient copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cells for top performance: the solar cells are developed by the EMPA spin-off Flisom [1], our industrial partner in the project. First life-cycle calculations have shown that it would take only 18 months for the adaptive solar façade to offset the CO2 emitted in the module’s manufacture.

As part of the EU Climate-KIC’s Building Technology Accelerator flagship project [2], we are currently investigating how and in what form the adaptive solar façade, and thus the soft actuator, can be developed into a marketable product. If this is successful, our adaptive façade could contribute to the efficient generation of building energy and thus to energy transition.

Further information

House of Natural Resources HoNR

Website of the Chair of Architecture and Building Systems.

References:

[1] EMPA spin-off Flisom

[2] EU Climate-KIC BTA flagship project

Soft robotics combines the design of electromechanical systems with the study of soft and flexible materials, often inspired by biological systems. A growing number of research groups, companies, and individual designers and makers have been contributing to the field in recent years. The Soft Robotics Toolkit was launched in September 2014 and is intended to enable students, designers, and researchers to share and build upon each other’s work in this exciting area. The toolkit is a website containing documentation on the design, construction, and characterization of soft component technologies including sensors, actuators, and control boards.

In the seven months since its launch, the toolkit has had almost 250,000 page views by over 40,000 users in 150 countries. In light of the incredible outpouring of support from the community, the toolkit development team has announced two competitions for soft robotics design and research. The aim of these competitions is to recognize those who make soft robotics such an exciting area and to reward individuals and teams who advance the field.

The first competition, the 2015 Prize for Contributions in Soft Robotics, is intended to support and promote research that advances the field of soft robotics. The toolkit website currently contains documentation from seven research groups at Harvard and ETH, and further contributions from leading soft robotics groups at other institutions are forthcoming. Researchers are invited to submit original work to the toolkit in order to be considered for the prize. An international panel of expert judges will award one entry a grand prize of $5,000. Example entries might include new control architectures or component technologies, novel methods of modeling and analyzing compliant electromechanical systems, or new experimental procedures for characterizing soft devices.

The second competition, the Soft Robotics Design Competition 2015, rewards individuals and teams who create new and interesting devices using material they can find on the toolkit website. Example projects might include robots capable of manipulating delicate objects or of novel forms of locomotion, or improved control systems for soft robotic systems. Eligible designs may be entirely “soft,” or may combine traditional rigid robotic elements with soft components. The only limitation (besides entrants’ imaginations) is that the design must make use of at least one component technology from the Soft Robotics Toolkit website. The judging panel, composed of designers and researchers from industry and academia, will select a winning entry and two runners-up for prizes of $3,000 and $1,000 respectively.

In order to be considered for the awards, entrants must register by May 15^th, with the final project documentation due June 15^th. The response so far has been fantastic. To date, 66 teams have registered to participate, with 23 countries and 34 universities represented. For more information on how to participate, please see the competition website.

Baymax, Chris Atkeson and Hiro from Disney’s Big Hero 6. Source: Chris Atkeson

Baymax, the lovable, inflatable robot star of Disney’s recent hit, Big Hero 6, is far from a movie fantasy. With their soft cushiony bodies, robots like Baymax have very real prospects as future care-givers, space-travellers and more. Robohub’s Helmut Hauser spoke to the man who inspired Baymax – Chris Atkeson, Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University – about the hard science behind soft robotics.

[HH] Professor Atkeson, can you give us the background – how Disney approached you and how they decided to use a soft robot for the role of Baymax?

[CA] When Disney makes one of these animation movies, they do research. For example, for the movie Frozen, they had a bunch of animators who were from Southern California and had not really experienced snow. They sent a lot of them to Norway to play in the snow there and film it. That led to the movie Frozen.

For Big Hero 6, they knew they were going make a movie about a robot. They had the outline for the story from a Marvel comic, but they really wanted a robot that was new and different, they didn’t want a Terminator or a Transformer. So they contacted Disney Research, which tours robot laboratories around the world. One of the laboratories they visited was mine. They saw our work on inflatable robots to help dress, people, feed them and comb their hair, and the Disney folks were very happy because they’d found their robot: an inflatable robot that was very, very different from anything that had been in the movies before. And they also found a character for Baymax – a health or personal care, companion robot.

You are working in the field of soft robotics. Could you please explain what that is?

We’d like to have robots help take care of people and trying to do that with a very heavy robot is difficult, because sometimes computers break down or crash and the robot moves in unexpected ways, and sometimes people aren’t very co-operative. When I give a tour of my robotics lab to children, they often try to grab the robot by the legs and [it] could fall down. If a robot is very heavy, let’s say 100-150 kilograms, it can hurt the children or a pet. So I decided the best way to make a robot safe is to make it as light as possible, because mass is what causes gravitational force. Your momentum and your energy are proportional to mass. So, if we can reduce mass, we can reduce force and momentum; we can reduce energy and make it a much safer robot. So I was actually interested in light-weight robots – and maybe that’s what the field should be called – but we ended up deciding that the best way is to make inflatable robots and they’re inherently soft, so we got classified as “soft robotics.”

Can you also talk a little bit about the technological challenges that you have to face when you build inflatable robots?

Many people worry that an inflatable robot is too weak to do anything useful. So, one of the things we tested was: can they lift heavy loads? And yes, they can lift 10 or 15 kilograms and that’s enough for a lot of the care tasks that we want to do. If you don’t use a robot in the configuration of an arm of a humanoid and, instead, put the inflatable part underneath something, you can lift a larger mass. Inflatable devices are used to lift cars and buildings, so they can be very, very strong.

The second fear with inflatable robots is, if you puncture it, it will deflate and be useless. It turns out that the suits used for space walks, on the International Space Station, are also inflatable robots. They’re designed to self-seal if they’re damaged, so they don’t deflate immediately; there are techniques to help inflatable robots survive when they’re punctured, they can have compartments. So, puncturing an inflatable robot is not a big problem. In Big Hero 6, the robot repairs itself after it has several holes in it.

Yes, exactly – with scotch tape.

Yes.

Can you say a little bit more about energy efficiency? Is there a lot of energy needed in order to keep the pressure up in the robot or is that quite easy to do?

I don’t think it’s a lot of energy. It all depends on how much leakage you have. If you have a system that’s continually leaking and inflating, it may run up your energy bill. But if you have a situation where the structure doesn’t leak very much, and you only have to add a little air once in a while, that’s not a big problem.

Lightweight carbon fiber skeleton for an arm. Source: Chris Atkeson

You’ve already talked a little bit about possible applications for such types of robots. Do you have any other applications, outside of care-taking, in mind?

Robots that are toys and interact with children need to be very, very safe so I think soft, or lightweight, robots have an application there. Basically, [in] any kind of situation where you’re interacting with people, we need a high amount of safety.

Do you use any special sensors for your inflatable robots? Maybe a stretchable, bendable sensor, or do you use off-the-shelf sensors?

I think when you have a robot that’s not rigid, you tend to rely more on vision and external sensing. A rigid model can rely on sensors in the joints to achieve accuracy, but with the soft robots, you tend to have to look at where your hand is and where the target is in order to figure out: are you reaching the target accurately?

Closely connected to that, the control approach might be different as well, right? Or do you employ the same techniques that are used for a rigid robot?

I think the control approach may well be different. You can think of it as a much more flexible or complicated dynamic, essentially everything bends. And that means you have to be a little more cautious and use lower “control gains” or “stiffnesses” in order to move the robot around. So I think there need to be slightly different techniques, both in sensing and in control.

Your name is well-known in the field of machine learning too. I was wondering if you have any plans to link your expertise there to soft robots. Do you see the soft body as an advantage there?

We have already used learning for the “kinematics” of the robot; in other words, how to reach accurately, even though the parts of the robot are soft and bendy. The big surprise is that, when you start building complicated metal robots, hard robots, they also bend if they’re complicated enough – like a humanoid robot – because they have so many joints and there is play in them. So some of the techniques that we originally designed for soft robots are actually turning out to be useful for learning with the metal robots.

Baymax concept skeletons. Source: Walt Disney Animation Studios

In the movie, Hero builds rigid body parts for Baymax to enable it to fly around and to fight. Do you think that would make sense in real-life? And, if so, what applications could this have?

I think it’s a very good idea to have robots that can change modes. In this case, Baymax put on a hard outer shell in order to become stiff, and I think that makes a lot of sense. If you have a service or house robot, and it needs to be strong, it could use tools or put on a suit in the same way that people use tools. I think it’s a very cost effective way to get robots to do a wide range of things.

Do you also see a use for such types of robots outside the house, for disaster relief or for military use, for example? Because I would assume that a soft robot doesn’t have to model its environment in order to move around in it. Would that be a good application?

It depends on what kind of disaster you’re imagining. If you have an earthquake, for example, and a lot of rubble, you need small, agile robots to find victims, and very strong robots to dig them out. So maybe we’d have more specialized robots, say, in Japan preparing for an earthquake. If it’s a disaster that involves a lot of people getting sick, like the Ebola situation, then the soft robots may make more sense. They can be made very cheaply because we are using techniques similar to the ones used to make clothes, so we could even have disposable robots rather than trying to clean them. So, in the United States, when the Ebola problem was much greater a few months ago, there was some discussion about what kind of robots we should develop and soft robots was a possible answer.

What about using such types of robots for exo-planetary exploration, since, in space travel, weight and mass are a big issues?

Sure. Did you know we use inflatable landing systems to land probes on Mars? So, that’s already an example. If you’re going to build a habitat that people live in, it would probably be inflatable, if you want to deploy very large structures in space. Currently, we use unfolding wing-like things that are quite complicated. It’s possible that inflating them would be a better way to go – to make very large solar panels or antennas.

Baymax concept. Source: Walt Disney Animation Studios

You have a project called “Build Baymax”. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yes. Of course, it’s inspired by the movie. There are two parts to the project. One is building the body: Can we build something with the capabilities of the robots in the movie? The second part is building the brain: Can we build robots that are capable of having the artificial intelligence that Baymax showed in the movie? We have groups to pursue those two targets, building the body and building the brain.

The movie is – I think – really inspiring, for adults as well as for kids. Because it talks about being a good scientist and being curious about things. So, if you were to give advice to kids who may be interested in soft robotics, what good sources are there for inspiration? What kind of skills does someone need to join the next generation of soft roboticists?

I would, of course, emphasize that studying mathematics and science is very important. But, I also think it’s possible for children to build soft robots, because it’s like making clothes and children can do it at home. If you want to build a metal robot, you typically need access to parts. With soft robots, it’s like building a kite and you can do that in your home. You can have some fun and get some experience. In the United States, we have a term, “home economics,” which is about teaching people to sew and things like that. Soft robotics could make home economics popular again.

Further reading on soft robotics:

Chris Atkeson’s webpage
Build Baymax website
Robosoft – An EU research community around soft robotics

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See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Exhibiting at big events takes both time and money. Is it worth it for a robotics startup to invest in big expos like CES?  We asked Bill Culley of Empire Robotics – the company behind the VERSABALL soft ball gripper – to share his perspective. 

Why is Empire Robotics at CES?

We are at CES to show people that industrial robots are entering a new age – an age where it is safe to interact with them, they are easy to use, and they have capabilities beyond the old hard coded, do the same thing a million times with no error tolerance. Our robot gripper is soft, safe to work around, easy to program, and highly adaptable to a changing environment.

What is exciting at CES this year?

Well, there are certainly some very innovative technologies and product unveilings at the show this year. Plenty of connected and wearable devices, and of course the new Tesla Model X. And believe it or not, our little 10’x10’ booth has managed to garner coverage on par with some of these other high profile releases. People seem to be interested in robots, so we created a demo for people to come challenge a robot to a game of beer pong, and it’s gained attention beyond our expectations.

What’s the value for you given that CES is consumer facing and your product falls more into the industrial use category? 

This is not our target market (electronics consumers vs. industrial manufacturing engineers), so we don’t expect to meet customers at this show. But, we have found that a lot of our customers find us by reading an article on a tech blog, or seeing a posting on facebook in a engineering gadgets group. So we figure if we create a demo of our technology that can grab attention, the story will make its way to our target audience through second and third degree sharing from one interested engineer to the next.

Was it worth it?  

Yes. We have participated in trade shows, large and small, in the past and they always end up being worth it. Making one good connection often pays for the cost of the event, and we learn a lot by talking about our technology and answering hundreds of questions that reveal patterns in customer mindset. CES in particular … we have gotten great exposure in articles around the web already, and our video of the demo just hit 250,000 views. We’ve already had a few new customers contact us after they saw the beer pong demo, so it seems to be working.

What other conferences does a startup go to? 

Industrial trade shows are the best for us. We get to learn about our partners in the market, our competition, and our customers in a very focused place. It’s a great place to build relationships with other industry players by seeing the same people at different shows. And it seems to build customer confidence in our company when they see us at a few different trade shows – we start to blend in with the established names in the industry.

What advice can you offer other startups that are thinking of exhibiting at an expo?

Have a demo that grabs attention from a distance. Many of our customers cruise through an expo in half a day to see if there is anything new, then head back to their office. If they can’t see our grippers doing something they’ve never seen before from ten feet away, they’ll pass right by us.

Empire Robotics specializes in flexible robotic end-effectors that leverage the jamming phase transition of granular materials. You can learn more about the technology behind their VERSABALL gripper here. 

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See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Transcript 

Andra: I’m talking today with Soft Robotics CEO, Carl Vause. Can you tell us about your work?

Carl: Our expertise is in the soft actuator, where we are able to make robotic actuators of completely elastomeric material – rubber, silicon rubbers, polyurethanes. It’s a really different aspect of making what you’re normally used to … rigid manipulators, or parallel bar linkages, or linear actuators … but we’re really doing it without any rigid components.

Andra: And what research has this come out of?

Carl: The company was actually spun out of Harvard.

In 2007 there was a DARPA project called ChemBots and Harvard was an awardee on that project. Professor George Whitesides in the chemistry department actually took up the challenge… [which was to] build an octopus. And instead of trying to build a mechatronic robot that we’re all familiar with, they developed the soft actuator … trying to replicate the tentacle. Out of that came the intellectual property that is called ‘pneumatic networks’ – and using pneumatic networks you can build all kinds of different actuators to make fingers, hands, joints and the like.

Harvard worked on this for about five to six years, and then there was a decision that the technology had matured to the point where it was no longer in the best interest to continue research. [Instead they began] commercializing the technology and using it to solve some well-understood problems, and so the company was put together in the late spring/early summer of 2013.

Andra: What are some of the problems and specific applications that you are looking at for Soft Robotics?

Carl: One of the things that’s really interesting about the technology is that it’s low cost, it’s conformal, and you can design the hands in an open loop system to apply just the right amount of force.

The example I use is picking a tomato off of a vine. This would be a very, very difficult problem for a traditional robotic manipulator to do with closed-loop feedback. We can design a soft hand with elastomeric fingers that will only operate at a force that is below the crush force of a tomato. And so you just simply visualize a tomato, you activate the gripper, and it will grab the tomato and pull it.

This really opens up what I like to think of as the future of robotics into collaborative robotics: having robotics being able to work side by side with people and factories, handing instruments and tools to workers on assembly lines … or automating areas that we haven’t been able to automate until now, such as produce processing and food processing. Right now it’s very hard to handle fruits and vegetables with robots, but we really feel that soft robotics will unlock this capability.

Andra: You’ve mentioned collaborative robotics – the ability to safely work alongside people – as one of the significant benefits. And you also mention the opening up new areas, for example handling food and agricultural products. Do you think this will also apply to some of the other areas that have not been so easy for robotic manipulation, like fabrics, textiles, other deformable materials?

Carl: Absolutely I do.

One of the big challenges in robotics is how do you handle these soft things. If you’re shipping a shirt from the shirt manufacturer to an outlet like The Gap, they come folded in a plastic wrap. Picking up a folded shirt in a plastic wrap is very difficult for a robotic manipulator, but we’ve actually shown [we can] handle these delicate highly unstructured objects, and we can do it with a lower complexity than is typically done today. And that same grasper we demonstrated handling a folded shirt can also pick up a bag of rice, or things as varied as children’s toys.

Andra: I find soft robotics a very interesting area because of these wide applications, but naturally there are some limitations as well. I assume there are tradeoffs in accuracy or perhaps in strength. Where do you feel the boundaries of the applications are?

Carl: The biggest feedback we get right now is lifespan.

Traditionally in the research environment, soft robotic devices have not had the best lifespan – they’ve had very low cycles – and if you are talking about automating things such as textile handling, produce handling or collaborative robotics, you need to have cyclic lifetimes that are similar to traditional hard graspers. This is a problem that we’ve really focused on solving, and right now in our lab we have one of our soft manipulators running on a lifetime test. As of this morning we are approaching three million cycles, so we feel like we’ve really bridged that lifecycle/lifetime problem that some soft robotics technologies have had.

The other challenge we have had and are working to address is speed of grasp. Sometimes in soft robotics you’re moving a fluid – whether it’s pneumatic or hydraulic – and it’s obviously at a slower rate than with an electrical motor. But we’ve also demonstrated grasp times in the hundred millisecond range. We feel that the current limitations are well known, but that they can be solved and that solving them is deterministic.

Andra: Are there some advantages as well, in terms of the cost and power-to-weight ratios?

Carl: Absolutely.

Right now we have a small gripper – a light-payload gripper – that can handle about 600 grams reliably. But it weighs only 100 grams, so when you put it on the end of a 1kg arm, you’ve got quite a bit more payload than a traditional device where you’re looking at maybe half of your end-of-arm payload taken up by the weight of the end-effector. We’re able to create very lightweight end-effectors, which make can collaborative arms much more productive in terms of payload capacity.

The other advantage that’s really been a powerful part of soft robotics is the cost. All of our cost goes into the engineering of the devices, but once we can get manufacturing a device, it’s really composed of proprietary design of the actuators, and then a light material such as polycarbonate and silicon elastomers. We’re not talking about an end-effector that’s got a lot of sensors and stepper motor and linkages in it. We believe that the standard cost for an adaptable end-effector can come down in price by an order of magnitude very easily, which is really important to opening up this new market of collaborative robotics.

Andra: You’re having to create a startup that’s going into unchartered waters, and I’m hoping you can tell me a little bit about the process. Soft Robotics has been in existence as a company for just over one year?

Carl: Since July of 2013.

Andra: How many people are there on your team?

Carl: Right now there are five of us. Two fulltime engineers, myself, and we use two consultants to keep the books and take care of our regulatory responsibilities.

Andra: Your background is not in robotics research so much as in business, and you’ve been doing medical devices before this. How did you come to join Soft Robotics?

Carl: My undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering and I worked on doing stepper motor control with 8-bit micro controllers. We were running assembly language at the time, and it was very miserable. I had forgotten all about that and was spending a lot of time with medical devices. I was introduced to [soft robotics] technology, and we were looking at various medical applications for it because of its soft conformal nature, obviously. The thing that makes soft robotics fantastic for handling tomatoes also makes it fantastic for handling human organs.

But when we got started, I remembered all the difficulties I had with control systems and feedback loops, and realized that we had a soft open-loop manipulator technology and that we should really spend time with the robotics community. And once we sat down with the robotics community, [their] feedback was, “This is the kind of thing we’ve had been waiting for! We’ve been trying to make the human hand, and that’s a very costly endeavor that takes a long time and a lot of effort … and you’ve created this highly dexterous, conformal, lightweight device in a short period of time!” With that initial feedback we decided to put all of our major efforts into focusing on the robotics opportunity.

Andra: Has this been supported through commercialization grants through the university, through the labs? What’s the process that has taken you this far, and what’s coming next?

Carl: It’s very difficult to run a hardware startup these days. We’re in the days of mobile apps and wonderful online portals that can access billions of people, but hardware startups require people and engineers and time.

We were lucky in that we did get some initial funding through the government, through two DARPA grants. DARPA had seen thetechnology in the university lab and asked us to push it forward. We’ve also been very lucky with angel investors. The company has been funded partially through government grants and the majority through angel investors who have seen the technology, done their fact checking with the robotics community, and who believe that this is something that will change robotics and will be very important going forward.

Andra: What I see is that angels are playing quite an important role in getting robotics startups closer to a large seed round or series A round, and it is a slower process than it is for many other startups. Certainly mobile and apps tend to give the impression of being cheap and easy to get off the ground, and it’s not totally the case. Whereas with hardware, it’s rarely the case that it’s cheap and easy.

Carl: It’s very interesting because in many of the discussions I have with investors, I try to help them understand that we need to buy materials, we need to fabricate things, we need to have access to a machine shop, and these are not things they’re accustomed to hearing from people working on software.

Andra: What do you think is coming up, that you’re facing?

Carl: The biggest obstacle in this is when you’re taking the technology out of university. The universities do very cutting edge early-stage research, and they’re not concerned about things like cost and manufacturability and scalability of a business process. That is what we spent the first nine months working on: could we get a good design space where we could build soft robotics in a 3D CAD system. That required a lot of work by our engineers. Second, we had to find vendors who could help us actually manufacture the parts in quantity, so that when we did start engaging companies we could sit down and say, “Look we’ve got a design space, we understand the design variables to solve these problems, and we have a manufacturing house that can make these in lots of 100 and lots of 1000 if desired.” That was a good nine months at the beginning of the company.

Now it’s really about understanding what the most important problem to solve is. We can do a lot of things with the soft gripper, and we’ve had suggestions for manipulating chickens and poultry processing, which is very interesting, but I know very little about poultry processing.

So we’ve been engaging the integrators, the end-users, and the robotics companies to really understand what problems they would like to see solved.

To circle back, the dominant themes really are realizing that dream of collaborative robotics, and automating industries (or parts of industries) that haven’t been conducive to robotics yet. But the feedback is, with soft robotics we could really bring automation to those new markets.

Andra: Are you going to tackle this one market at a time? For example, prove one out, and the add another? Or prove one out and then add ten or a hundred others?

Carl: I would say there’s maybe a third way.

What I’d like to do is to prove one out, focus on one market and really show that we can make a difference and then use the technology to go into new markets. And as early stage startup, focus really is important to our success.

As we are proving out these ‘one’ markets, one of the things we’ve been focused on is the unstructured warehousing environment: the ability to pack something that comes in a small electronics box, such as a phone or a tablet, or that shirt that’s wrapped in cellophane, or a football. Manipulating all these with the same system is very challenging and that’s a problem we believe we can solve.

But in that process, we have found that there are a lot of things that people would like us to focus on. Textiles is a good example, produce is a good example. So to bring it back to your original question, we are focusing on single markets at a time, but as we have focused on making a difference in those, that series processing if you will, we’re learning more that’s allowing us to open up new conversations in new markets.

Andra: What do you think is the single biggest obstacle that you’re facing in terms of startup growth? This could range from recruitment, to tools, to facilities, to funding, to things that I haven’t even thought of mentioning …

Carl: If I were giving advice to someone who’s going to start a robotics startup today, I would have them really spend a lot time on how to fund their company. We were at the Massachusetts Innovation UnConference two weeks ago, where we actually ran a session on funding the hardware startup. Traditional backers, the venture capitalists of the world, would really like to see traction.

Traction is the big word you hear in startups today. That means you have to have a prototype or you have to be running live pilots with potential paying customers or potential business partners. [You need to understand] the path and the funding necessary to get you from a really good idea or core technology, to where you have a pilot running and a customer, so you could stand in front of a venture capitalist and say, “This is real technology, we have solved the scientific risk. We can make it work and we have meaningful customers who are interested in the technology.”

By understanding that that’s the journey you’re going to be required to walk, I think you’re bringing clarity to [your] business plan. Unfortunately the world where you can have really great intellectual property or a great idea and get funding, it’s just becoming more difficult in recent years. So getting to that first customer contact is very, very important.

Andra: I agree, and I think by definition there’s a lot of intellectual property out there, but it’s hard to prove that it has value.

Carl: Yes.

Andra: Unless you have developed traction. I’d actually avoided using that word even though it’s written down in my notes, so thank you for bringing that up. [Laughs.]

Carl: You’re welcome!

Andra: Is there anything that you would like to say that we haven’t covered? Do you have any other tips for startups that you’d like to share?

Carl: Absolutely.

There are three things about doing a robotics startup today that I think are very important. One is, everyone is fascinated by robotics, and so whenever I’m out somewhere and someone hears the word robotics, they’re very interested in what we’re doing.

But as we’ve discussed many times at tradeshows, the public perception of robotics is very different from the reality of robotics, and [so second, you need to help] bridge that gap [by showing] the problems we’re trying to solve today versus the reality.

And third is that when you speak with investors – whether they are potential angel investors, or venture capitalists as investors – you need to help them understand the reality of robotics today, and also the vision of what robotics can be, and how you’re going to help move the industry forward. This is really the key I would say.

If you could remember those three things, you could be very successful in this industry.

Andra: That’s great. Thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed the discussion!

All interviews are edited with great care for clarity of content, and may not represent the text of the original interview exactly. We can not assume responsibility for their accuracy. 

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The team, comprised of Daniela Rus, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of CSAIL, Cagdas Onal, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Andrew Marchese, a doctoral candidate in engineering at MIT, created the robot to be autonomous. This means it has all the necessary sensing, actuation and computation on board. Its flexible body is made of silicone rubber. The robot fish is able to swish from side to side as onboard gas inflates and deflates different parts of its body. This means that the robot is flexible and can maneuver like a real fish—making a full C-turn with its body in just 100 milliseconds.

According to Rus, this type of soft robot is inherently safe, saying “As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it’s much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there’s no danger if they whack you.”

The fish can perform 20-30 agile escape maneuvers before its carbon dioxide canister runs out. The team is working on an updated version that will be able to swim for around 30 minutes using water to inflate its interior channels rather than carbon dioxide.

In the not so distant future, the fish-bot could be put to use for covert science missions where it might be able to infiltrate schools of real fish to collect data about their behavior.  

The field of soft robotics holds great potential for the development of smart machines that can adjust their shape and size to fit variable environments and interact with living things without causing them harm. Possible applications include: mine detection, assistive healthcare, search and rescue missions and space instrument repair.

In this second lecture hosted by the Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Matteo Cianchetti builds on the previous lecture to talk about building soft actuators for soft robots. In Matteo’s lecture, titled “Soft actuator design methods“,  he explains that the devil is in the details, but that it’s possible to build soft actuators by insightfully exploiting the properties of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA). Want to learn how?

Guest Lecture – “Can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ cause a paradigm shift?” by Minoru Asada

In this talk Prof. Minoru Asada from the University of Osaka, in Japan, shows the results and discusses the underlying principles of his research on developmental robotics and the of the psychological development of the basic human cognitive functions in the baby and even in the fetus! This is an iconic example of synthetic methodology application.

How can we simulate the development of a fetus, for example? And above all, can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ really cause a paradigm shift? Watch Asada’s  lecture here:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Hosted by Prof. Cecilia Laschi from the Scuola Superiore S. Anna in Pisa, Italy, this ShanghAI episode puts together contrasting approaches to ‘embodied intelligence’ and ‘embodied cognition’ in her lecture titled “How an octopus can help build a robot”.

Laschi, who among many other things has coordinated the European ‘Octopus’ project,  shows a radical approach to embodiment starting from the bottom-up, by taking us through the development of the physical soft structure of a robot octopus. Soft robotics has a lot to say about embodied cognition and morphological computation, and also involves several non-trivial engineering challenges. Can building an artificial octopus really help to advance robotics? Don’t miss Cecilia Laschi’s lecture:

Guest Lecture – “From scene segmentation to task based grasping” by Danica Kragic

In this talk Prof. Danica Kragic from the KTH in Stockolm, Sweden shows the benefits of embodiment to grasping – from a top-down approach based on computer vision, machine learning and AI. Kragic has led the Grasp european project, and is a leading researcher in the area of AI and robotics. Whatever DARPA tells you, the problem of grasping still isn’t solved. For example we still don’t have a robot that is able to take the dishes from a real world sink and put them into a dishwasher (this would be a killer application, do you agree?) How long will we have to wait?

A top-down approach to solving ‘real problems’ within the embodied approach to AI and robotics still has several basic research questions to answer. If you have been following the previous lectures you may have noticed that many researchers are approaching the issue of embodied cognition with sometimes very different methods and models, and a synthesis at the level of concrete mathematical models is still missing.

The good news is that we may be on right path. Find out what Kragic has to say on the matter:

Guest Lecture – “Hard Work for Robotics from Soft Actuators” by Bram Vanderborght

Soft robots need soft actuators, and building soft actuators is not a trivial task. Prof. Bram Vanderborght is with the Vrije University Brussels and does cutting-edge research on soft actuators, in particular in legged locomotion of humanoid robots. Dive into the modeling and engineering challenges and subtle solutions presented by Bram Vanderborght in his talk:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

This is the second part of the “Design Principles for Intelligent Systems” ShanghAI Lecture. After Rolf Pfeifer’s class, Barry Trimmer (Tufts University, USA) gives a guest presentation about 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.

Barry Trimmer: Living Machines: Soft Animals, Soft Robots and Biohybrids

Related links:

• Slides (5.5 MB)
• ShanghAI Lectures website
• Book: How the Body Shapes the Way We Think