Name: Why Robots That Bend Are Better
Uploaded: 2021-03-13T15:49:26.000Z
Duration: 10 min 42 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

基礎受動態

but flexible materials like plastic tubing.

and why would you want a soft robot in the first place?

Check out their robots at the end of the show.

So is the idea that the robot could walk this way?

So you can kind of chain these rolls together

to kind of roll around in any environment.

They call this punctuated rolling locomotion.

on a face until it tips over and now it's on a new face and it can then continue to

move its center of gravity. Once that center of gravity exits the support polygon or the

base, then it tips over one of the edges of the face.

- This is a different soft robot made out of flexible tubing. It was designed to mimic

the way a turtle walks, where diagonally opposite legs move together. It's powered entirely

by compressed air and perhaps most impressive, it requires no electronics. All of the circuitry

is pneumatic and this means the robot can be used in places like mines, where electronics

could spark explosions, or in the strong magnetic fields around MRI machines. But why would

you want a soft robot in the first place?

- One of the things that I like to do is just to take the robot and kind of like beat it

up a little bit and show how it's compliant and compressive.

- If you'd like to take a whack at it, you know, feel free.

- But I don't think this is your work, I don't want to break it, obviously.

- For operation around humans, there's not much damage a soft robot can do to you. I

- This is a pretty crazy compliant robot.

- Because the the fundamental structure of this robot is compliant, there's only some

maximum force that it could ever exert on me. So it's inherently safe to be operating

- Could we make it fall and have me be inside it?

- Yeah. Yeah, we could do that for sure. Just watch your head.

- All right, let's try it. Here it comes. Well, that's not bad at all. Is it?

- I can try another shape. That's supposed to open up one of the faces, so you can jump

- I haven't tested it in a little while, so...

- I don't know how it's gonna go, but let's try this. There you go that's the face right

there to your right and you can exit the trust from that face.

- Just that easy. Did you build this by yourself?

- Me and one other grad student built this entire thing ourselves, basically.

- We did it in about a month, I want to say, like actually constructing everything.

- And was it tricky? I mean, were you sewing that stuff?

- The main structural members of this robot are fabric tubes inflated with air.

- Yeah, so these red tubes are a nylon fabric and then internally, there is a polyethylene

- The tubes are inflated to about six PSI above atmospheric. So it's almost one and

a half atmospheres. Each tube passes through pairs of rollers connected to a motor. The

rollers pinch the tube, so it bends kind of like a pinched straw.

- Add the rods and then we have this like high friction material wrapped around the

rods. And then that coupled with the fact that we have this pressurized tube that's

kind of pushing the membrane of the tube into the rollers, prevents us from slipping.

- By driving the motor, it changes the length of the tubes.

- Kind of like when a clown creates a twist in a balloon and then folds that balloon into

a balloon animal. The difference between what the clown does and what we do is that there's

some passage of air between adjacent segments of the tube. So that as the robot drives around,

we're not pressurizing the segments of the tube.

- This robot is made of four inflated tubes, each one connected to a pair of motors, forming

- We also think that they kind of look like sausage links when put together, which is

why we've named these robots after different sausages. So this one's called Polish, that

one over there is Chorizo, There's a Linguica and a kielbasa over there somewhere.

- So what shape is the overall thing? It's an octahedron?

- Yeah, we call it an octahedron because if you drew lines between these kind of kinematic

joints here, it would create an octahedral shape.

- Driving the motors together, allows the robot to dramatically change shape. It can

get very tall or short and squat. But since the tubes themselves don't change in length,

the overall perimeter of the robot, the length of all the edges combined doesn't change.

So the robot is considered isoparametric. How do you feel when you watch those Boston

- Oh, I love those videos, they're so cool.

- The Boston Dynamics robots are kind of terrifying.

- I guess and the idea with soft robots, it's to like convince people that robots are good

and soft and kind, and friendly and fake?

- That's definitely true, yeah. There are some things that you can do to rigid systems

to make them feel like compliant systems based on how you're controlling the motors. But

yeah, they're definitely, you know, heavy expensive and can be dangerous if they're

- The hard robots we're used to are strong and precise. Their actions are accurate and

repeatable, but they are also heavy and they can't really change their volume as dramatically,

but this robot is still capable of carrying a heavy load.

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Why Robots That Bend Are Better

structure

tricky

manipulate

capable