Micro-fluidics and Flexible Robotics
Curt Bright
Author
12/21/2017
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280
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Description
Nebraska researchers find faster and easier methods for making soft robots.
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- [00:00:00.200](upbeat music)
- [00:00:08.112]In terms of soft robotics, it's a new way
- [00:00:10.032]of thinking about actuation, manipulation,
- [00:00:14.160]grasping of objects and things like that
- [00:00:17.599]where you replace rigid things like metals
- [00:00:21.670]and hard plastics that you see in a traditional
- [00:00:24.211]robotic device with materials that are
- [00:00:27.311]completely soft and compliant.
- [00:00:30.325]Soft robotics as a field is also very
- [00:00:32.470]inspired by invertebrate organisms.
- [00:00:34.712]So replacing bone structure with completely soft materials.
- [00:00:38.480]And so if you've seen any of the things that octopi
- [00:00:40.811]and squid can do in terms of navigating their environment.
- [00:00:44.032]We're very interested in understanding
- [00:00:45.731]the surface chemistry of silicones, because we are
- [00:00:48.531]interested in creating hybrid structures from them.
- [00:00:51.768]And so those would be structures where we combine them
- [00:00:55.032]with materials that have a different stiffness.
- [00:00:58.637]And we got really interested in why
- [00:01:00.192]there was a limitation in what plastics
- [00:01:04.320]you could access, and what was going on
- [00:01:07.851]chemically that was leading to that limitation.
- [00:01:11.072]And so we kind of took a step back and said,
- [00:01:13.331]how can we encourage the surface chemistry to behave
- [00:01:16.611]in a way that gives us very reliable, robust bonds.
- [00:01:20.741]If we can do that, now we can really access
- [00:01:24.171]the sort of breadth of commodity polymers available
- [00:01:27.900]to the community, and we can also simultaneously
- [00:01:33.141]create a reliable interface between them
- [00:01:36.141]that can support microfluidic and soft robotic applications.
- [00:01:39.712]Because that was always the thing is,
- [00:01:41.680]it was limited to a certain number of materials,
- [00:01:45.032]but then beyond that, you really couldn't
- [00:01:47.392]access the pressures, et cetera,
- [00:01:49.741]you needed in microfluidics to make something useful.
- [00:01:53.080]We're giving them a template to
- [00:01:56.643]successfully integrate different materials
- [00:02:00.461]in a way that is very streamlined,
- [00:02:03.040]and that supports practical applications.
- [00:02:06.059]You can imagine disaster environments with difficult
- [00:02:08.720]terrain, search and rescue type applications.
- [00:02:11.672]Grabbing things that you don't wanna bruise,
- [00:02:14.192]and that's of course things like fruit and the like.
- [00:02:17.213]The analogy I use is, would you rather have
- [00:02:19.533]some sort of a soft gripper performing surgery on you,
- [00:02:22.952]or would you rather have the Terminator do that?
- [00:02:24.863]Whenever the Terminator does that, if something goes
- [00:02:27.584]wrong in the control feedback loop, you have a big problem.
- [00:02:30.853]Whenever you have the soft, compliant soft robotic
- [00:02:33.720]gripper doing that, if there's a problem,
- [00:02:35.853]it just sort of deflates like a balloon.
- [00:02:39.133](upbeat music)
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