Gumby-like flexible robot crawls in tight spaces

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Gumby-like flexible robot crawls in tight spaces
By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer – 3 hours ago

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Harvard scientists have built a new type of flexible robot that is limber enough to wiggle and worm through tight spaces. It's the latest prototype in the growing field of soft-bodied robots. Researchers are increasingly drawing inspiration from nature to create machines that are more bendable and versatile than those made of metal. The Harvard team, led by chemist George M. Whitesides, borrowed from squids, starfish and other animals without hard skeletons to fashion a small, four-legged rubber robot that calls to mind the clay animation character Gumby.

In recent years, scientists have been tinkering with squishy — sometimes odd-looking — robots designed to squeeze through hard-to-reach cracks after a disaster like an earthquake or navigate rough terrain in the battlefield. "The unique ability for soft robots to deform allows them to go places that traditional rigid-body robots cannot," Matthew Walter, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an email.

A team from Tufts University earlier this year showed off a 4-inch (10-centimeter) caterpillar-shaped robot made of silicone rubber that can curl into a ball and propel itself forward. The Harvard project, funded by the Pentagon's research arm, was described online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new robot, which took two months to construct, is 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) long. Its four legs can be separately controlled by pumping air into the limbs, either manually or via computer. This gives the robot a range of motions including crawling and slithering. The researchers tested the robot's flexibility by having it squirm underneath a pane of glass just three-quarters of an inch from the surface. Scientists maneuvered the robot through the tiny gap 15 times using a combination of movements. In most cases, it took less than a minute to get from side to side.

Researchers eventually want to improve the robot's speed, but were pleased that it did not break from constant inflation and deflation. "It was tough enough to survive," said Harvard postdoctoral fellow Robert Shepherd, adding that the robot can traverse on a variety of surfaces including felt cloth, gravel, mud and even Jell-O.

There were drawbacks. The robot is tethered to an external power source and scientists need to find a way to integrate the source before it can be deployed in the real world. "There are many challenges to actively moving soft robots and no easy solutions," Tufts neurobiologist Barry Trimmer, who worked on the caterpillar robot, said in an email.

Robotics researcher Carmel Majidi, who heads the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, said the latest robot is innovative even as it builds on previous work. "It's a simple concept, but they're getting lifelike biological motions," he said.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.>>

[geckzilla]

Do flexible robots need flexible batteries?

[orin stepanek]

Do flexible robots need flexible batteries?

It looked like it was attached to an umbilical cord!

[neufer]

Do flexible robots need flexible batteries?

It looked like it was attached to an umbilical cord!

Scientists create paper-thin, flexible, biodegradable battery
By Chris Lee | Published 4 years ago

[b][color=#0000FF]Paper battery: Tiny and flexible: the future of batteries?[/color][/b]

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Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Also noteworthy: bodily fluids can act as the electrolyte, which
hints at medical applications. The capacitor would be put into
a patient fully charged but dry, and when more power was needed,
bodily fluids would be allowed into the device to allow it to discharge.

<<If you crack the back off of an iPhone or any other modern portable electronic device, you'll find a big honking battery that takes up a huge amount of space and contributes to a large part of the device's weight. Fuel cells and solar power have both been floated as promising solutions to the battery weight/capacity problem, but new research suggests that carbon nanotubes may eventually provide the best hope of implementing the flexible batteries and supercapacitors needed to shrink our gadgets even more.

Part of the problem with designing flexible batteries and supercapacitors has always been the necessity of layering such devices. Typically, two electrode layers sandwich two charge-holding layers, with an insulating layer in the middle of it all. As the layers build up, flexibility goes out the window.

However, researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT have developed a new material that eliminates the need for a multilayer battery. They grew carbon nanotubes on a silicon substrate and impregnated the gaps between the tubes with cellulose—that's right, plain old paper. The cellulose also covered the ends of the nanotubes, but once it had dried, the paper material could be peeled off of the silicon substrate, leaving one end of the carbon nanotubes exposed to form an electrode.

By putting two sheets of paper together with the cellulose side facing inwards (and a drop of electrolyte on the paper), a supercapacitor is formed. These supercapacitors retain the flexibility of normal paper, but they have a rating that is comparable to that of standard commercial hardware—a 100g sheet could replace a 1300mAh battery. Because the medium is flexible, the researchers say you could shape batteries of all sizes for very specific use.

It doesn't stop there, however. By putting a drop of electrolyte on a single sheet and then putting a metal foil consisting of lithium and aluminum on each side, a lithium ion battery is formed. This paper device had a respectable 110mAh/g capacity, and the researchers indicate that small prototypes could already power small mechanical devices like fans. These batteries and supercapacitors are quite stable and have been shown to operate over a wide range of temperatures, with the research showing that they can operate between -78–150°C.

The flexibility (pun intended) of this system shouldn't be understated. Batteries and capacitors can be combined in any way desirable simply by controlling where the electrolyte is placed and where the second sheet of paper is placed. The power density isn't fantastic, but it makes up for that by being able to fit into strange shapes, and it could even be wrapped around the electronics inside a device.>>

[Orca]

I think this is an interesting but creepy robot.

Speaking of powering robots: who noticed the lack of solar panels on Curiosity at first glance? I didn't! I first noticed while reading about the LIBS system that solar panels would be insufficient to power the craft and all its equipment.