we're here at cornell university and
this is kirsten peterson's lab the
collective embodied intelligence lab so
in general throughout all the projects
in this lab it's about creating large
collectives of robots and minimizing
the amount of manufacturing that has to
go into into it so that we can
manufacture a large amount of robots
one of the projects is the
soft sleeve we have
a set of resistive sensors on a sleeve
each of these black lines on the soft
sensor are made up of a carbon black
slash ecoflex gel where
they're
electrically conductive and when you
inflate it around an object
you can map out the shape of the object
by
measuring the amount of time that it
takes for one of the lines of resistance
to stop showing a change in resistance
the end goal of the sleeve is to
integrate it into
vineyards where you could have a soft
robot or a soft sensor
go up to these grapes the grape clusters
and inflate it around the grapes without
damaging them and then be able to
reconstruct the geometry and get other
uh characteristics out of it like for
example it's ripeness so you could also
incorporate other types of sensors into
this so what bits of kind of hardware
and software are you using for this i
mean is it fairly standard stuff
so i guess one of the main takeaways of
this soft sensor is that it's
relatively easy to make um
it's basically just a couple of layers
of silicone and then one layer of
carbon black
and equal flex gel and then
you hook it up to the arduino and you
inflate it and you can get some data out
of it uh it's a pretty simple setup so
the idea would be that people can
manufacture these sensors pretty easily
right here you have a bunch of output
lines and basically you have
an input and
electricity on one side and then the
output and you're measuring measuring
the change in resistance
by taking it out to an arduino and in
the arduino you can map it out onto a
plot where you can see uh
the change in resistance as a function
of time there's one arduino and then
there's two multiplexers here to get the
readings out and these are the
uh one is to inflate the sleeve and then
the other is to vacuum the air out
oh you got a big compressor down there
yeah
so this one needs a
uh
a higher pressure to actually be able to
inflate the foam
is this stuff 3d printed
uh no this is all molded so it has
a good amount of steps in the
fabrication process so basically it's
several layers of ecoflex a type of
silicone a molded around a foam and the
foam gives you a given porosity 50
porosity like 50 open space for air to
flow through it that creates an amount
of fluid resistance and causes a
traveling wave through the robot right
now the demo is yeah for movement and
basically it's inching forward by having
a traveling wave across the robot but
what we want to show mainly is that you
can have a single inlet and then have a
sequence of actuations uh enabled by the
fluidic resistance from the foam inside
the soft robot
uh we have some kind of leak
so you use the compressor to build up
some pressure and then inferior
it's hypnotic yeah
i guess something that we can see right
here is
uh i'll turn this off
so what we're trying to show right here
is that you can have a single inlet of
pressurization and then using the foam
inside um with a 50 porosity of 50
amount of open space then you can create
an amount an amount of fluid resistance
and then with that you can use it to
create a sequence of actuations the neat
thing about this is that it's embedded
into the design of it right so the foam
inside creates that amount of fluid
resistance that allows for the delay
between the first leg and then
and the second line and the third leg i
guess um because it's here air is pretty
invisible uh has a very low viscosity so
you don't see the difference as much as
if it was being inflated by water this
was an initial project and then the next
step uh that we're doing is
creating a
a program that uses
these electrical circuit analogies to
automatically design the structure of
the foam inside so if you let's say i
have a given porosity at the beginning
and then a lower porosity at the end
then i'll have a change in the amount of
delay that certain sections of the foam
give and then i could have a program uh
even more control over the sequence of
actuations that i have we have
these uh fluid uh slash electrical
circuit analogies where you can model
each of these segments each component of
the robot has a fluidically resistive
and a fluidically capacitive region and
if i assign a certain value to that then
i can map out the amount of time that it
would take the fluid to
reach that part of the foam if i send an
impulse of pressure of air or water the
final goal of this would be to use that
uh automatic automatic design synthesis
program to say
okay well we have this robot we have
this general shape for the robot and we
want
uh an inlet right here and some
uh outlets of pressurization at these
points and we want the sequence of
actuation and
um and that could be for a swimmer or a
crawling robot and by using um
a foam structure and a single inlet
pressurization source then you could
have the sequence of actuations for the
soft robot
single wave we're working on more
complex implementations and finally it
can even perform something called
concertina locomotion and so
ethernet down to the the hex engine the
control system which is around the side
here we come around the side set up
underneath the driver's chair