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Robotics Controlled by Bursts of Air

Robotics researchers, engineers, and materials scientists from Rice University and Harvard University proved it possible to make programmable, nonelectronic circuits that control the actions of soft robots by processing information encoded in bursts of compressed air.

“Part of the beauty of this system is that we're really able to reduce computation down to its base components,” said Rice undergraduate Colter Decker  , lead author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Topics:
Automation Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:03 our lab has done a lot of work on the fluidic soft control schemes for soft robotic systems in this case Coulter have been working on that in our lab so he already had the background knowledge and experience but actually went to a summer research program at Harvard University where he worked in the lab of George Whitesides and essentially initiated the system architecture that

    00:00:25 then he brought back to Rice University wrapped up the project in the form of this collaboration and developed the work that we see here part of the beauty of this system is that we're really able to reduce computation down into their base components and people have been doing research on these electronic systems for years and years and years so as soon as

    00:00:43 you're able to recreate those same electronic components with analogs to pressure and flow rate and sort of voltage and current you can build up the same computation using that existing research that we have for for years the three main demonstrations are products that we made with these valves were one an untethered robot so it was completely Electronics free but a user

    00:01:07 could program the amount of steps that it takes before it moves forward and grabs something and then returns to the user so we see use cases and environments that traditional robots may not succeed so high radiation High magnetic fields or combustible environments the second thing we made was an analog glove for improved human robot

    00:01:29 interactions and so in the paper we demonstrate a human user controlling a robotic hand just with the Motions of their fingers and doing so in a continuous fashion but you could replace that robotic hand with any existing soft device for an easy way for humans to control robots and then the final thing that we made was a prototype of a cushion Matrix

    00:01:50 designed for use on hospital beds which is a really good use case because most hospital rooms come equipped with a pressure source and this cushion Matrix is designed to help maneuver patients roll patience lift head or feet or oscillate patients to stimulate muscles that may not be being used the undergraduates at Rice are truly top-notch and quilter in his case

    00:02:13 actually has risen to essentially what I would say the level of a PhD student in terms of some of his output as an undergraduate researcher [Music] foreign