By Hayley Dunning and Caroline Brogan
The prototype drone, called FireDrone, could be sent into burning buildings or woodland to assess hazards and provide crucial first-hand data from danger zones. The data would then be sent to first responders to help inform their emergency response.
The drone is made of a new thermal aerogel insulation material and houses an inbuilt cooling system to help it withstand temperatures of up to 200°C for ten minutes. Currently at prototype stage, the researchers believe FireDrone could eventually be used to scope out fires for people and extra hazards to bolster firefighting.
Principal Investigator Professor Mirko Kovac, Director of the Aerial Robotics Lab at Imperial College London and Head of the Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics at Empa, said: “Until they enter the danger zone, firefighters can’t be certain of what or who they’ll find, and what challenges they’ll encounter.
“FireDrone could be sent in ahead to gather crucial information so that responders can prepare accordingly to keep themselves safe and potentially save more lives.”
– Professor Mirko Kovac
Drones are already used from afar in firefighting to take aerial footage, hoist fire hoses up skyscrapers, or drop fire retardant in remote areas to slow the spread of wildfires. However, current drones developed for firefighting are unable to fly much closer lest their frames melt and their electronics fail.
Based on interviews with firefighters, the researchers knew drones that could get much closer could help to prepare first responders for entering burning buildings or woodland. Drones equipped with cameras and carbon dioxide (CO2) sensors, for example, could provide crucial information about the layout and composition of fires.
They looked to animals that live in extreme temperatures like the penguin, arctic fox, and spittlebug, for inspiration. All these have appropriate layers of fat, fur, or produce their own layers of thermoregulating material that allow them to thrive in extreme conditions.
Inside the drone, showing the layer of aerogel. Credit: Empa
To build the drone, they created a protective structural shell made of lightweight, thermally super-insulating materials like polyimide aerogel, and glass fibres. They coated this with super-reflecting aluminium to reflect heat. The super-insulation prevents the materials from shrinking and pore structures from degrading after exposure to high temperatures.
Within the protective exoskeleton, they placed the temperature-sensitive components, such as regular and infrared cameras, CO2 sensors, video transmitters, flight controllers, batteries, and radio receivers. They also used the release and evaporation of gas from the CO2 sensors to build a cooling system to keep temperatures down.
They tested the drone in temperature-controlled chambers and flew it close to flames at a firefighter training centre. They hope that their further work to miniaturise and add more sensors to the drone might lead to its deployment in real-life firefighting missions and help save lives.
FireDrone can also be used in extreme cold environments, in polar regions and in glaciers. The team has also tested the robot in a glacier tunnel in Switzerland to study how the system behaves in very cold temperatures.
FireDrone tested in a glacier
Although FireDrone is at prototype stage, the researchers say it is a step forward for the development of other drones that can withstand extreme temperatures and the team is now validating the technology with key industrial stakeholders and partners.
Professor Kovac said: “The application of drones is often limited by environmental factors like temperature. We demonstrate a way to overcome this and are convinced our findings will help to unleash the future power of drones for extreme environments”.
“Deploying robots in extreme environments provides great benefits to reducing risks to human lives, and who better to look to than animals that have evolved their own ways of adapting to these extremes using inspirating from how animals keep cool in heat.”
Source: OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 with prompt “a hyperrealistic picture of a robot reading the news on a laptop at a coffee shop”
Welcome to the 2nd edition of Robo-Insight, a biweekly robotics news update! In this post, we are excited to share a range of remarkable advancements in the field, showcasing progress in hazard mapping, surface crawling, pump controls, adaptive gripping, surgery, health assistance, and mineral extraction. These developments exemplify the continuous evolution and potential of robotics technology.
In the domain of hazard mapping, researchers have developed a collaborative scheme that utilizes both ground and aerial robots for hazard mapping of contaminated areas. The team improved the quality of density maps and lowered estimation errors by using a heterogeneous coverage control technique. In comparison to homogeneous alternatives, the strategy optimizes the deployment of robots based on each one’s unique characteristics, producing better estimation values and shorter operation times. This study has important ramifications for hazard response tactics, enabling collaborative robot systems to map hazardous compounds in a more effective and precise manner.
An environment where the model is simulated. Source.
And speaking of ground robots, a special soft robot created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, combines the gait patterns of sea stars and geckos. This innovative robot demonstrates enhanced crawling ability on different surfaces, including slopes, by utilizing limb motion inspired by sea stars and adhesive patches inspired by geckos. The robot’s capability to adhere to surfaces and navigate is achieved through the integration of pneumatic actuators and specially designed gecko patches. This breakthrough in soft robotics holds potential for a wide range of applications, particularly in aquatic environments.
Bioinspiration images. Source.
Also in relation to soft robotics, Harvard University researchers have created a compact, soft peristaltic pump that addresses the major challenge of bulky and rigid power components in the field of soft robotics. The pump can handle a variety of fluids with various viscosities and has changeable pressure flow thanks to electrically operated dielectric elastomer actuators. The pump can be used to make cocktails. However, its application is also far greater as it can be used in manufacturing, biological therapies, and food handling because of its small size and adaptability. The advancement creates new opportunities for soft robots to carry out delicate jobs and maneuver through challenging conditions.
The soft pump that can power the robots. Source: Harvard
Shifting our focus to robotic gripping, using vitrimeric shape memory polymers, researchers from Brubotics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Imec have created form-adaptive fingertips for robotic grippers. When subjected to particular circumstances, these polymers can reversibly alter their mechanical characteristics. For delicate objects, the fingertips are curled, while hard bodies have straight fingertips. By heating the shape-adaptive fingertips over their glass transition temperature and reshaping them with outside forces, the fingertips can be programmed. The researchers showed that the fingertips can grab and move objects of various forms, showing promise for adaptive sorting and production lines.
The Shape Adaption process, Source
In the field of robotic surgery, to improve the accessibility and functionality of the da Vinci Surgical Robot, researchers at Wayne State University recently developed a ChatGPT-enabled interface. The ChatGPT language model’s strength enables the system to comprehend and react to the surgeon’s natural language commands. The implementation enables commands like tracking surgical tools, locating tools, taking photos, and starting/stopping video recording, providing straightforward and user-friendly interaction with the robot. Even though the system’s accuracy and usefulness showed promise, there are still issues to be resolved, such as network latency, errors, and control over model replies. The long-term effects and prospective influence of the natural language interface in surgical settings need to be assessed through additional research and development.
This shows the process the model goes through. Source
And speaking of robots in healthcare, researchers from the University of Maryland have developed Calico, a small wearable robot that can attach to clothing and perform various health assistance tasks. Weighing just 18 grams, Calico can act as a stethoscope, monitor vital signs, and guide users through fitness routines. By embedding neodymium magnets into the clothing track, the robot can determine its location and plan a path across the body. With a 20-gram payload capacity and speeds of up to 227 mm/s, Calico offers promising potential for healthcare monitoring and assistance in the future.
Calico over clothing. Source: University of Maryland
Finally, in the realm of lunar material extraction, Legged robots are being developed by Swiss engineers from ETH Zurich as part of ground-breaking research to get them ready for mineral prospecting trips to the moon. The researchers are teaching the robots teamwork in order to guarantee their usefulness even in the case of faults. The team intends to maximize productivity and account for any shortcomings by combining experts and a generalist robot outfitted with a variety of measuring and analytical tools. The robots’ autonomy will also be improved by the researchers, allowing them to delegate jobs to one another while yet preserving control and intervention choices for operators.
An image of the trio of legged robots during a test in a Swiss gravel quarry. (Photograph: ETH Zurich / Takahiro Miki) Source: ETH Zurich
These recent advancements across different domains demonstrate the diverse and evolving nature of robotics technology, opening up new possibilities for applications in various industries. The continuous progress in robotics showcases the innovative efforts and potential impact that these technologies hold for the future.
Sources:
Dr. Volker Strobel, postdoctoral researcher; Prof. Marco Dorigo, research director of the F.R.S.-FNRS; and Alexandre Pacheco, doctoral student. The researchers from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Credit: IRIDIA, Université Libre de Bruxelles
In a new study, we demonstrate the potential of blockchain technology, known from cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, to secure the coordination of robot swarms. In experiments conducted with both real and simulated robots, we show how blockchain technology enables a robot swarm to neutralize harmful robots without human intervention, thus enabling the deployment of autonomous and safe robot swarms.
Robot swarms are multi-robot systems that consist of many robots that collaborate in order to perform a task. They do not need a central control unit but the collective behavior of the swarm is rather a result of local interactions among robots. Thanks to this decentralization, robot swarms can work independently of external infrastructure, such as the Internet. This makes them particularly suitable for applications in a wide range of different environments such as underground, underwater, at sea, and in space.
Even though current swarm robotics applications are exclusively demonstrated in research environments, experts anticipate that in the non-distant future, robot swarms will support us in our everyday life. Robot swarms might perform environmental monitoring, underwater exploration, infrastructure inspection, and waste management—and thus make significant contributions to the transition into a fossil-free future with low pollution and high quality of life. In some of these activities, robot swarms will even outperform humans, leading to higher-quality results while ensuring our safety.
Once robot swarms are deployed in the real world, however, it is very likely that some robots in a swarm will break down (for example, due to harsh weather conditions) or might even be hacked. Such robots will not behave as intended and are called “Byzantine” robots. Recent research has shown that the actions of a very small minority of such Byzantine robots in a swarm can—similar to a virus—spread in the swarm and thus break down the whole system. Although security issues are crucial for the real-world deployment of robot swarms, security research in swarm robotics is lacking behind.
In Internet networks, Byzantine users such as hackers, have been successfully prevented from manipulating information by using blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is the technology behind Bitcoin: it enables users to agree on `who owns what’ without requiring a trusted third party such as a bank. Originally, blockchain technology was only meant to exchange units of a digital currency, such as Bitcoin. However, some years after Bitcoin’s release, blockchain-based smart contracts were introduced by the Ethereum framework: these smart contracts are programming code executed in a blockchain network. As no one can manipulate or stop this code, smart contracts enable “code is law”: contracts are automatically executed and do not need a trusted third party, such as a court, to be enforced.
So far, it was not clear whether large robot swarms could be controlled using blockchain and smart contracts. To address this open question, we presented a comprehensive study with both real and simulated robots in a collective-sensing scenario: the goal of the robot swarm is to provide an estimate of an environmental feature. To do so the robots need to sample the environment and then agree on the feature value. In our experiments, each robot is a member of a blockchain network maintained by the robots themselves. The robots send their estimates of environmental features to a smart contract that is shared by all the robots in the swarm. These estimates are aggregated by the smart contract that uses them to generate the requested estimate of the environmental feature. In this smart contract, we implemented economic mechanisms that ensure that good (non-Byzantine) robots are rewarded for sending useful information, whereas harmful Byzantine robots are penalized. The resulting robot economy prevents the Byzantine robots from participating in the swarm activities and influencing the swarm behavior.
Adding a blockchain to a robot swarm increases the robots’ computational requirements, such as CPU, RAM, and disk space usage. In fact, it was an open question whether running blockchain software on real robot swarms was possible at all. Our experiments have demonstrated that this is indeed possible as the computational requirements are manageable: the additional CPU, RAM, and disk space usage have a minor impact on the robot performance. This successful integration of blockchain technology into robot swarms paves the way for a wide range of secure robotic applications. To favor these future developments, we have released our software frameworks as open-source.