Weekly Robot News
Hello viewers!
Welcome back to your one-stop-shop for all news Robotics!
We’re back once more with the latest, sometimes shocking, happenings of the Robotic Tech world.
From learning exactly how to print a robot from scratch, microrobots that display versatile
movement patterns, and developing a better ionic skin, all the way to the robot Lyra
helping transform nuclear infrastructure inspection, improving robots' ability to hand-over objects,
and AI that can predict if and when a cardiac arrest will happen, we have it all and more!
So without further adieu, let’s jump right into our weekly updates!
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Highlights of the Week
* How to Print a Robot from Scratch Imagine a future in which you could 3D-print
an entire robot or stretchy, electronic medical device with the press of a button -- no tedious
hours spent assembling parts by hand.
That possibility may be closer than ever thanks to a recent advancement in 3D-printing technology
led by engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder.
In a new study, the team lays out a strategy for using currently-available printers to
create materials that meld solid and liquid components -- a tricky feat if you don't want
your robot to collapse.
"I think there's a future where we could, for example, fabricate a complete system like
a robot using this process," said Robert MacCurdy, senior author of the study and assistant professor
in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering.
MacCurdy, along with doctoral students Brandon Hayes and Travis Hainsworth, published their
results April 14 in the journal Additive Manufacturing.
3D printers have long been the province of hobbyists and researchers working in labs.
They're pretty good at making plastic dinosaurs or individual parts for machines, such as
gears or joints.
But MacCurdy believes that they can do a lot more: By mixing solids and liquids, 3D printers
could churn out devices that are more flexible, dynamic and potentially more useful.
They include wearable electronic devices with wires made of liquid contained within solid
substrates, or even models that mimic the squishiness of real human organs.
* Microrobots Display Versatile Movement Patterns Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for
Intelligent Systems, Cornell University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed
collectives of microrobots which can move in any desired formation.
The miniature particles are capable of reconfiguring their swarm behavior quickly and robustly.
Floating on the surface of water, the versatile microrobotic discs can go round in circles,
dance the boogie, bunch up into a clump, spread out like gas or form a straight line like
beads on a string.
Each robot is slightly bigger than a hair's width.
They are 3D printed using a polymer and then coated with a thin top layer of cobalt.
Thanks to the metal the microrobots become miniature magnets.
Meanwhile, wire coils which create a magnetic field when electricity flows through them
surround the setup.
The magnetic field allows the particles to be precisely steered around a one-centimeter-wide
pool of water.
When they form a line, for instance, the researchers can move the robots in such a way that they
"write" letters in the water.
The research project of Gaurav Gardi and Prof. Metin Sitti from MPI-IS, Steven Ceron and
Prof. Kirstin Petersen from Cornell University and Prof. Wendong Wang from Shanghai Jiao
Tong University titled "Microrobot Collectives with Reconfigurable Morphologies, Behaviors,
and Functions" was published in Nature Communications on April 26, 2022.
* Developing a Better Ionic Skin In the quest to build smart skin that mimics
the sensing capabilities of natural skin, ionic skins have shown significant advantages.
They're made of flexible, biocompatible hydrogels that use ions to carry an electrical charge.
In contrast to smart skins made of plastics and metals, the hydrogels have the softness
of natural skin.
This offers a more natural feel to the prosthetic arm or robot hand they are mounted on, and
makes them comfortable to wear.
These hydrogels can generate voltages when touched, but scientists did not clearly understand
how—until a team of researchers at UBC devised a unique experiment, published recently in
Science.
"How hydrogel sensors work is they produce voltages and currents in reaction to stimuli,
such as pressure or touch—what we are calling a piezo ionic effect.
But we didn't know exactly how these voltages are produced," said the study's lead author
Yuta Dobashi, who started the work as part of his master's in biomedical engineering
at UBC.
Working under the supervision of UBC researcher Dr. John Madden, Dobashi devised hydrogel
sensors containing salts with positive and negative ions of different sizes.
He and collaborators in UBC's physics and chemistry departments applied magnetic fields
to track precisely how the ions moved when pressure was applied to the sensor.
"When pressure is applied to the gel, that pressure spreads out the ions in the liquid
at different speeds, creating an electrical signal.
Positive ions, which tend to be smaller, move faster than larger, negative ions.
This results in an uneven ion distribution which creates an electric field, which is
what makes a piezoionic sensor work."
* Robot Lyra Helping Transform Nuclear Infrastructure Inspection
A robot named Lyra has been used to inspect a ventilation duct in Dounreay's redundant
nuclear laboratories and map radioactive materials.
Lyra traversed 140m of duct from a single entry point and provided operators with detailed
radiological characterization information that can now be used to help plan safe and
efficient decommissioning of the laboratories.
Previously, gaining this amount of detailed information would be complex and, even where
possible, it would require operations staff to make additional airline suit entries into
contaminated areas, increasing cost and elevating risk.
Human access to this area is currently impossible due to the size of the duct and radiological
risks.
This deployment has proven that mobile robots can be used to accelerate the pace of decommissioning
legacy nuclear facilities in the UK, while at the same time reducing the risk to humans,
decreasing costs and even reducing the amount of additional low-level waste that is generated
during decommissioning.
* Model to Improve Robots' Ability to Hand Over Objects
For decades, researchers worldwide have been trying to develop robots that can efficiently
assist humans and work alongside them as they tackle a variety of everyday tasks.
To do this effectively, however, the robots should be able to interact naturally with
humans, including handing them and receiving objects from them.
Researchers at NVIDIA have recently developed a model that could be used to enhance the
ability of robots to naturally pass and receive objects from human agents.
This approach, introduced in a paper set to be presented at ICRA 2022, is based on a framework
called STORM, which they presented in one of their previous works.
"In this work, we focus specifically on making sure that robots can take any object from
a human user," Dieter Fox, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.
"We came up with a solution that integrates a learned approach for grasping with our predictive
control approach, in order to ensure these handovers are predictable, natural, and fast,
so that people see the robot as a safe, helpful assistant."
* AI Predicts If and When Cardiac Arrests Happen
A new artificial intelligence-based approach can predict, significantly more accurately
than a doctor, if and when a patient could die of cardiac arrest.
The technology, built on raw images of patient's diseased hearts and patient backgrounds, stands
to revolutionize clinical decision making and increase survival from sudden and lethal
cardiac arrhythmias, one of medicine's deadliest and most puzzling conditions.
The work, led by Johns Hopkins University researchers, was detailed recently in Nature
Cardiovascular Research.
"Sudden cardiac death caused by arrhythmia accounts for as many as 20 percent of all
deaths worldwide and we know little about why it's happening or how to tell who's at
risk," said senior author Natalia Trayanova, the Murray B. Sachs professor of Biomedical
Engineering and Medicine.
"There are patients who may be at low risk of sudden cardiac death getting defibrillators
that they might not need and then there are high-risk patients that aren't getting the
treatment they need and could die in the prime of their life.
What our algorithm can do is determine who is at risk for cardiac death and when it will
occur, allowing doctors to decide exactly what needs to be done."
With that, we come to the end of this video.
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