Translator: lisa thompson Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So you probably think [that] in our modern world,
we understand all of our physical spaces,
but it's not true.
There are many spaces that are either too small
or too dangerous for humans to enter.
We can use robots to explore these spaces
and give us information we couldn't get otherwise.
I've spent my career building robots to do all kinds of things,
quite often deploying robots in difficult situations -
it was quite challenging -
and often learning lessons the hard way:
for example, that you shouldn't sit on a chair on a sand dune.
Clearly not a good idea.
But only recently has it occurred to me
that exploration robots are really going to make a difference to our lives.
So you probably think, "Well, this is strange.
Why would exploration robots really have an impact upon my life?"
Well, one of the things that you all do is -
under our feet, there are literally millions of miles of pipes.
We've all been there, going to work in the morning,
you get stuck with roadworks digging up pipes,
trying to repair the pipes.
These pipes will fail.
They need repair.
And right now, pretty much,
they get repaired by digging a big hole and fixing it.
What we can do in the future is have robots in these pipes
to either inspect them before they become damaged
or in fact, even repair them.
So we'll be going to work;
we'll have no idea, under our feet, a small robot is repairing pipes.
It sounds like science fiction,
but it's certainly come and it's certainly here.
We've been doing some work
looking at how we can build robots to go inside pipes.
So we've got here a pipe-climbing robot, a prototype robot.
Pipes, in fact, are quite complex.
So you have long sections of very flat, sort of straight pipes,
but you also have pipes that are quite complex:
they bend; they twist; they have obstacles in them.
So you need some kind of robot that has quite a bit of dexterity.
So our robots use what's called an inchworm process.
That is that it has rubber discs that come out and grip the pipe at one point,
in this case on the top.
Then you release the bottom rubber grippers.
Then the robot contracts.
Then you grip other side and vice versa,
so you keep doing this gripping and extending motion - inchworm motion.
By doing that, you can travel along the pipe, getting great traction.
So you do this.
And also, this robot here can also do maneuvers
where the actual top rubber pads can move around.
They can move in different directions so you can steer around corners
and even choose to go in different directions -
if you've got a T-junction, in different directions.
So certainly in 20 years, these things will be under your feet.
We've taken this similar kind of concept,
and we've done some work to explore the pyramids of Egypt.
Again, you probably think,
"Well, the pyramid is a strange place to explore robots."
But there are spaces in that pyramid
that have lain undiscovered, literally, for thousands of years.
So we've been looking at how we can do this.
Take a pyramid.
If you slice it in half, you would see a central chamber,
and you would see shafts
going from the central chamber towards the outer casing.
These so-called air shafts don't penetrate the outer casing.
They go up.
At some point, they kind of get blocked by a blocking stone,
and they don't penetrate the outer casing.
So the question is: what are these air shafts for?
And also: is there something behind the end of the termination shaft?
So the scenario we have is like what I'm showing here.
So at the end of the shaft, you have a stone
which has been nicknamed "The First Blocking Stone."
It's a stone that sits there; it basically terminates the end of the shaft.
We know it's there.
We know behind this, there is some kind of space -
again, we don't know quite how big or what it is -
and behind that, what's called the second blocking stone.
Again, it's a stone.
It could be part of a massive pyramid,
it could be a 15-ton block,
or it could be another kind of doorway to something else.
These shafts, by the way, are actually 200 mm by 200 mm.
They're really quite small.
So clearly, we can't put a person inside there to explore it.
We need some kind of robotic technology.
So we've built an inchworm-type robot.
It works on a very similar principle to the previous robot
in the fact that it has pads on the front, pads on the rear.
These pads extend and retract,
and also the central carriage goes backwards and forwards.
So you can do an inchworm motion through these shafts.
We have to travel 50 meters,
so it's clearly a long way up these shafts.
We have 15 cameras.
When you climb on these shafts, it's immensely stressful.
You can probably imagine.
You're in the shafts,
and if it gets stuck, it really gets stuck.
You have to be able to see what's going on,
perceive what's going on in the environment
with all these different cameras.
This photograph was taken
on the morning before our most successful ascent up the shaft.
And on this day, nothing worked, as you can probably imagine.
Technology is just terrible sometimes.
So we lost our camera feeds, we lost our sensors, all this kind of thing.
Eventually, we managed to patch it together to climb the shaft,
but quite interestingly,
when we got to the top of the shaft, it all started working.
So for some reason on that day, fate really did shine upon us,
and we were able to see what was going on.
So at the top of the shaft, you would see this:
this is a blocking stone here.
So it's a heavily decorated stone,
pristine limestone,
with a hole drilled by a previous team,
who just looked in the hole and couldn't see anything.
You'll also notice the copper handles.
These are ornate handles.
No one's really sure what they're for, but they certainly are decorative.
We got there. We saw this. Fantastic.
We carry on our robot tools, such as a drill and the snake camera.
The snake camera is a very small tool that can go through a hole
and have a dexterous end that can look around and see what's going on.
You can see here the picture of the actual snake arm going through.
On this particular day, we ran out of time,
so you can imagine how difficult this was.
With this situation here, we've got it all set up, the camera's there.
Time to go home.
The next day, we had to come and find out what was going on,
but we were quite fortunate
in the fact we did find writing hidden for 4,500 years:
some red figures.
These figures probably indicate numbers,
which are probably symbolic towards the actual length of the shaft.
So it was really quite a nice result.
We haven't yet probed the second blocking stone,
which is the one behind the first one.
And ideally, we'd better drill that hole and move forward.
So I've shown you here a very, kind of, simple snake arm,
so it's like a pole with a small, dexterous arm on the end.
We can use snake cameras to explore much more complex situations.
So for example, in search and rescue, a building collapses down,
you've got one wall you can drill a hole through.
You want to drill a hole.
You want to insert some kind of flexible, dexterous robot through that hole
and see behind - what's going on - to look for survivors, for example.
So we've built quite a few of these, kind of, snake robots.
You'll see here a link of one of our snake robots.
So a snake robot,
it basically is lots of bars, with articulated joints between them,
that can be controlled to move in a flexible way.
So you put it through a hole; it can move, and you can look around.
This particular snake arm is 12 millimeters in diameter.
That's really quite thin,
so it's quite a small hole, which is quite useful.
To articulate the joints, you have to pull on wires.
So inside that small-diameter bar are high-tension wires.
You pull on these wires, you can move the snake arm and look around.
One of the things with this, though,
is that because it's such a small diameter,
you need huge amounts of force to move this thing.
So we've gone from this very delicate, kind of, nice, pristine little snake arm
to an enormous system which can provide hundreds of newtons of force.
This is required to be able to apply enough tension to move it.
And in fact, in our work, we've shown that for a 12-mm diameter bar,
using current materials science,
the maximum length we can get is three meters.
So clearly this kind of technology is fine
if you want to look quite close through a hole;
if you want to explore much further through the hole,
you need a different kind of technique.
So we've also bought another kind of robot, a borehole robot,
which can go through the hole and can explore much further.
So in this case here, it has a slightly bigger diameter.
You can look through it. You can insert your robot through it.
It goes through in a straight line.
On the other side, it reconfigures into a conventional tracked vehicle.
Then you can drive and explore
for hundreds of meters beyond the actual entrance point,
so clearly it's a much more versatile system
than having the conventional type snake robot.
I do think, though,
that actually the biggest challenge for us is really yet to come -
the biggest exploration.
You're probably thinking, "Well, is that exploring Mars?"
"Is there some kind of really intricate place to go?"
In my opinion, the biggest place for robot exploration is inside our bodies.
So we, in the future, will have robots that can come inside our bodies,
that can perform diagnostic procedures,
but not only that, be able to repair us, make us better.
So already we know - we have a thing called minimally invasive surgery.
In this case here, you inflate the abdomen,
you make a small incision,
and you can insert tools - straight tools - into your stomach
and perform surgery.
One of the challenges here is: it's very hard to see what's going on.
You can imagine.
You have a very small, slender viewpoint, a couple of cameras.
It's very hard to perform complex procedures.
Ideally, what we'd want is some kind of robot that can go inside our body;
it can move around, walk around, give us a different perspective on our surgery.
So we've been doing some work in this,
and we developed a robot called Frogbot, as you'll see here -
so, nicknamed Frogbot because it's inspired by the tree frog.
So you want to go inside the body.
You want to be able to stick upside down on the stomach lining and walk around.
How do we do that?
How would you make a robot stick inside the body?
Well, the tree frog has great sticky feet.
On its feet, you'll see it has these small, little micropillars.
These actually serve to form adhesion to wet tissue.
So we fabricated these little pillars,
and we used these to create a robot
that could actually stick to wet objects and walk around and move around.
We built a robot which is eight motors, so it's quite a complex robot.
It needs to be quite complex to be able to do the four walking motions.
You can imagine a four-legged animal walking around.
It's quite complex.
So it's an eight-actuator robot to walk around on this kind of thing.
And it works really well.
But you can see here, it's really quite large.
I'm not going to ask for any volunteers to put a 600-mm robot inside your body.
Clearly, it's quite big.
So the future for this kind of work
is to try and really drive down the size of these things.
How can we make complex robots that are all integrated together?
Well, we know that in the future, we've got 3D printing -
even now, in fact, 3D printing -
so we can make complex mechanical structures quite straightforwardly.
What we can't do is make these structures
with integrated electronics, sensors, and computation.
So in the future, we'll be able to make these systems,
all complicated together, quite small, so we can perform this surgery.
So in summary, I am absolutely convinced
that exploration robots will not only make your lives better,
it'll make them longer.
Thank you.
(Applause)