Category News

Co-bot stands for “collaborative robots”. These robots are designed to work alongside humans, by performing repetitive or heavy tasks, which would greatly ease the burden on the human worker while he or she can focus on tasks that require higher skills.

A critical item for making this possible is to implement certain safety mechanisms on these robots, in order to prevent harm to humans. This can be achieved by certain sensors placed on the robots body, in order to prevent impacts to human workers. These sensors include force, torque and ultrasonic sensors. It is also necessary to cover robots body with soft material.

Working alongside humans means that there will be more unexpected circumstances in robots environment, in comparison to unchanging environments of industrial robots. Therefore, these robots must operate with considerably more complex visual recognition and AI abilities. These robots can also be trained for new tasks by literally guiding them physically in addition to classical programming, which is very intuitive and efficient.

The market of collaborative robots is ever growing, since their beginning about 1-2 decades ago.  

When completing missions and tasks in the real-world, robots should ideally be able to effectively grasp objects of various shapes and compositions. So far, however, most robots can only grasp specific types of objects.

Underwater structures that can change their shapes dynamically, the way fish do, push through water much more efficiently than conventional rigid hulls. But constructing deformable devices that can change the curve of their body shapes while maintaining a smooth profile is a long and difficult process. MIT's RoboTuna, for example, was composed of about 3,000 different parts and took about two years to design and build.

Winners will be invited to incubate their ideas with advice and guidance from venture studio experts, strengthening TONOMUS' portfolio of innovative cognitive technologies

By Liz Ahlberg Touchstone

First, they walked. Then, they saw the light. Now, miniature biological robots have gained a new trick: remote control.

The hybrid “eBiobots” are the first to combine soft materials, living muscle and microelectronics, said researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and collaborating institutions. They described their centimeter-scale biological machines in the journal Science Robotics.

“Integrating microelectronics allows the merger of the biological world and the electronics world, both with many advantages of their own, to now produce these electronic biobots and machines that could be useful for many medical, sensing and environmental applications in the future,” said study co-leader Rashid Bashir, an Illinois professor of bioengineering and dean of the Grainger College of Engineering.

Bashir’s group has pioneered the development of biobots, small biological robots powered by mouse muscle tissue grown on a soft 3D-printed polymer skeleton. They demonstrated walking biobots in 2012 and light-activated biobots in 2016. The light activation gave the researchers some control, but practical applications were limited by the question of how to deliver the light pulses to the biobots outside of a lab setting.

The answer to that question came from Northwestern University professor John A. Rogers, a pioneer in flexible bioelectronics, whose team helped integrate tiny wireless microelectronics and battery-free micro-LEDs. This allowed the researchers to remotely control the eBiobots.

“This unusual combination of technology and biology opens up vast opportunities in creating self-healing, learning, evolving, communicating and self-organizing engineered systems. We feel that it’s a very fertile ground for future research with specific potential applications in biomedicine and environmental monitoring,” said Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering and neurological surgery at Northwestern University and director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics.

To give the biobots the freedom of movement required for practical applications, the researchers set out to eliminate bulky batteries and tethering wires. The eBiobots use a receiver coil to harvest power and provide a regulated output voltage to power the micro-LEDs, said co-first author Zhengwei Li, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston.

The researchers can send a wireless signal to the eBiobots that prompts the LEDs to pulse. The LEDs stimulate the light-sensitive engineered muscle to contract, moving the polymer legs so that the machines “walk.” The micro-LEDs are so targeted that they can activate specific portions of muscle, making the eBiobot turn in a desired direction. See a video on YouTube.

The researchers used computational modeling to optimize the eBiobot design and component integration for robustness, speed and maneuverability. Illinois professor of mechanical sciences and engineering Mattia Gazzola led the simulation and design of the eBiobots. The iterative design and additive 3D printing of the scaffolds allowed for rapid cycles of experiments and performance improvement, said Gazzola and co-first author Xiaotian Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in Gazzola’s lab.

The design allows for possible future integration of additional microelectronics, such as chemical and biological sensors, or 3D-printed scaffold parts for functions like pushing or transporting things that the biobots encounter, said co-first author Youngdeok Kim, who completed the work as a graduate student at Illinois.

The integration of electronic sensors or biological neurons would allow the eBiobots to sense and respond to toxins in the environment, biomarkers for disease and more possibilities, the researchers said.

“In developing a first-ever hybrid bioelectronic robot, we are opening the door for a new paradigm of applications for health care innovation, such as in-situ biopsies and analysis, minimum invasive surgery or even cancer detection within the human body,” Li said.

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health supported this work.

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• PAPER – Remote control of muscle-driven miniature robots with battery-free wireless optoelectronics. Yongdeok Kim, Yiyuan Yang, Xiaotian Zhang,Zhengwei Li, Abraham Vázquez-Guardado, Insu Park, Jiaojiao Wang, Andrew I. Efimov, Zhi Dou, Yue Wang, Junehu Park, Haiwen Luan, Xinchen Ni, Yun Seong Kim, Janice Baek, Joshua Jaehyung Park, Zhaoqian Xie, Hangbo Zhao, Mattia Gazzola, John A. Rogers, and Rashid Bashir. Science Robotics 8.74 (2023): eadd1053.

Drones are operating increasingly in areas out of sight of the person controlling them. However, conventional remote controls have a limited range, which makes them unsuitable for these flights. On the other hand, simple mobile network-based systems have so far been unable to guarantee a reliable connection when mobile network loads are high or where there is a lack of network coverage. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI have joined forces with partners in the SUCOM project to develop a new mobile network system that can be used to control drones even over long distances and over difficult terrain.

Technological advances have opened exciting possibilities for space exploration, which could potentially lead to new discoveries about the celestial bodies in our galaxy. Robots have proved to be particularly promising tools to explore other planets, particularly Mars, a terrestrial planet in the solar system that is known to host some similar elements to those found on Earth.

Claire chatted to Professor Emily S. Cross from the University of Glasgow and Western Sydney University all about neuroscience, social learning, and human-robot interaction.

Emily S. Cross is a Professor of Social Robotics at the University of Glasgow, and a Professor of Human Neuroscience at the MARCS Institute at Western Sydney University. Using interactive learning tasks, brain scanning, and dance, acrobatics and robots, she and her Social Brain in Action Laboratory team explore how we learn by watching others throughout the lifespan, how action experts’ brains enable them to perform physical skills so exquisitely, and the social influences that shape human-robot interaction.

Humans are less forgiving of robots after multiple mistakes—and the trust is difficult to get back, according to a new University of Michigan study.

Scientists at the University of Bristol have drawn on the design and life of a mysterious zooplankton to develop underwater robots.

A group of robot engineers at the University of California Santa Barbara has designed and built a robot that mimics the way roots and vines move toward moisture sources. They describe their approach and robot prototype in a paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server.

End users are looking to machine builders to provide innovative solutions that improve upon the speed and accuracy of manual-based applications while maintaining the same level of flexibility.

End users are looking to machine builders to provide innovative solutions that improve upon the speed and accuracy of manual-based applications while maintaining the same level of flexibility.

These robotic units called RoboSalps, after their animal namesakes, have been engineered to operate in unknown and extreme environments such as extra-terrestrial oceans.

Although salps resemble jellyfish with their semi-transparent barrel-shaped bodies, they belong to the family of Tunicata and have a complex life cycle, changing between solitary and aggregate generations where they connect to form colonies.

RoboSalps have similarly light, tubular bodies and can link to each other to form ‘colonies’ which gives them new capabilities that can only be achieved because they work together.

Researcher Valentina Lo Gatto of Bristol’s Department of Aerospace Engineering is leading the study. She is also a student at the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training in Future Autonomous and Robotic Systems (FARSCOPE CDT).

She said: “RoboSalp is the first modular salp-inspired robot. Each module is made of a very light-weight soft tubular structure and a drone propeller which enables them to swim. These simple modules can be combined into ‘colonies’ that are much more robust and have the potential to carry out complex tasks. Because of their low weight and their robustness, they are ideal for extra-terrestrial underwater exploration missions, for example, in the subsurface ocean on the Jupiter moon Europa.”

RoboSalps are unique as each individual module can swim on its own. This is possible because of a small motor with rotor blades – typically used for drones – inserted into the soft tubular structure.

When swimming on their own, RoboSalps modules are difficult to control, but after joining them together to form colonies, they become more stable and show sophisticated movements.

In addition, by having multiple units joined together, scientists automatically obtain a redundant system, which makes it more robust against failure. If one module breaks, the whole colony can still move.

A colony of soft robots is a relatively novel concept with a wide range of interesting applications. RoboSalps are soft, potentially quite energy efficient, and robust due to inherent redundancy. This makes them ideal for autonomous missions where a direct and immediate human control might not be feasible.

Dr Helmut Hauser of Bristol’s Department of Engineering Maths, explained: “These include the exploration of remote submarine environments, sewage tunnels, and industrial cooling systems. Due to the low weight and softness of the RoboSalp modules, they are also ideal for extra-terrestrial missions. They can easily be stored in a reduced volume, ideal for reducing global space mission payloads.”

A compliant body also provides safer interaction with potentially delicate ecosystems, both on earth and extra-terrestrial, reducing the risk of environmental damage. The possibility to detach units or segments, and rearrange them, gives the system adaptability: once the target environment is reached, the colony could be deployed to start its exploration.

At a certain point, it could split into multiple segments, each exploring in a different direction, and afterwards reassemble in a new configuration to achieve a different objective such as manipulation or sample collection.

Prof Jonathan Rossiter added: “We are also developing control approaches that are able to exploit the compliance of the modules with the goal of achieving energy efficient movements close to those observed in biological salps.”

These robotic units called RoboSalps, after their animal namesakes, have been engineered to operate in unknown and extreme environments such as extra-terrestrial oceans.

Although salps resemble jellyfish with their semi-transparent barrel-shaped bodies, they belong to the family of Tunicata and have a complex life cycle, changing between solitary and aggregate generations where they connect to form colonies.

RoboSalps have similarly light, tubular bodies and can link to each other to form ‘colonies’ which gives them new capabilities that can only be achieved because they work together.

Researcher Valentina Lo Gatto of Bristol’s Department of Aerospace Engineering is leading the study. She is also a student at the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training in Future Autonomous and Robotic Systems (FARSCOPE CDT).

She said: “RoboSalp is the first modular salp-inspired robot. Each module is made of a very light-weight soft tubular structure and a drone propeller which enables them to swim. These simple modules can be combined into ‘colonies’ that are much more robust and have the potential to carry out complex tasks. Because of their low weight and their robustness, they are ideal for extra-terrestrial underwater exploration missions, for example, in the subsurface ocean on the Jupiter moon Europa.”

RoboSalps are unique as each individual module can swim on its own. This is possible because of a small motor with rotor blades – typically used for drones – inserted into the soft tubular structure.

When swimming on their own, RoboSalps modules are difficult to control, but after joining them together to form colonies, they become more stable and show sophisticated movements.

In addition, by having multiple units joined together, scientists automatically obtain a redundant system, which makes it more robust against failure. If one module breaks, the whole colony can still move.

A colony of soft robots is a relatively novel concept with a wide range of interesting applications. RoboSalps are soft, potentially quite energy efficient, and robust due to inherent redundancy. This makes them ideal for autonomous missions where a direct and immediate human control might not be feasible.

Dr Helmut Hauser of Bristol’s Department of Engineering Maths, explained: “These include the exploration of remote submarine environments, sewage tunnels, and industrial cooling systems. Due to the low weight and softness of the RoboSalp modules, they are also ideal for extra-terrestrial missions. They can easily be stored in a reduced volume, ideal for reducing global space mission payloads.”

A compliant body also provides safer interaction with potentially delicate ecosystems, both on earth and extra-terrestrial, reducing the risk of environmental damage. The possibility to detach units or segments, and rearrange them, gives the system adaptability: once the target environment is reached, the colony could be deployed to start its exploration.

At a certain point, it could split into multiple segments, each exploring in a different direction, and afterwards reassemble in a new configuration to achieve a different objective such as manipulation or sample collection.

Prof Jonathan Rossiter added: “We are also developing control approaches that are able to exploit the compliance of the modules with the goal of achieving energy efficient movements close to those observed in biological salps.”