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Designing Robots that Self-Assemble and Adapt in Space

University of Michigan engineers are working on creating self-assembling robots that can build themselves into any form required while they are out on a space mission. The researchers are drawing on a University of Pennsylvania project called FoamBot - a modular robot that while under remote control would assemble modules together with sprayable foam. Assistant professor Shai Revzen and his team at the Biologically Inspired Robotics and Dynamical Systems (BIRDS) Lab have built a new foam mixing system and are working on a variety of innovative solutions to create mechanical and robotic tools for challenging situations.

Topics:
Aerospace Automation Manufacturing & Prototyping Materials Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 There are a lot of missions we want to send robots out on where we don't really know what we need to do. The quintessential example I think was one of the Mars Rovers driving by a cliff that seemed to have something that could have been a fossil and not being able to climb up the wall because it wasn't made to do that. If we could send out a kit that can make a dozen different robots then in the field we can decide which robot we want to build. The first step in that direction was a project called Foambot

    00:00:29 where we had a modular robot that would drive out and then under remote control assemble modules together with sprayable foam and give it a body and then control that body. Those are the little modules that crawl out then our hideous little child crawls... crawls off the floor. So the original Foambot project was at UPenn and I think it was planting the flag in a new territory that no one saw before. What we're trying to do is copy ideas from nature into the principles of control that we apply in Foambot. But there were a lot of problems with that original Foambot idea. We're

    00:01:10 trying to demonstrate a principle so we did in the most expedient way possible which was using a commercially available spray foam solution. That nozzle jams after about 12 seconds of use. What you see here is our new foam mixing system. It's not yet assembled on a carrier robot which it will be on eventually. It constitutes two peristaltic pumps designed by Roberto here. Mixing very viscous materials like these foams is a lot more like making a good dough because as soon as you stop

    00:01:45 mixing the materials don't continue spinning like coffee would in a cup, they just stop. We built a mixing system that is essentially a spiral graph. It runs the paddle in this crisscrossing pattern using nested gears and it seems to be doing quite well we're still trying to figure out how to clean it after it mixes. It will stick in this mold because it's cardboard. It has a natural stickiest which why we have this plastic this material it will not stick to. One of the tricks is making a surface on which we can cast parts

    00:02:20 so this is something we could potentially make a robot build. These forms inflate by a factor of 20 which means that the amount of foam we actually would need the robot to carry is about the size of one of these little nodes. If we can get the structure strong enough we could build a robot that would build a bridge it could drive on for example that would make a huge difference. We as engineers we don't have a concept how to use materials that are low quality to achieve high reliability and complicated tasks in a robot

    00:02:50 Foambot could quadruple the number of Rovers they could deploy if we manage to get this to really work and this is just sending material from Earth if we could actually use material we find on the Moon or Mars it could be more than quadruple the number of robots we could sent into space that's a huge improvement. Related Video: Now are coming to new phase in robotics, the robots are going outdoors and facing real environments and so we want to look at animals

    00:03:16 which deal with an unpredictable environment...