Soft Robot With Microfluidic Logic Circuit

Perhaps our future overlords won’t be made up of electrical circuits after all but will instead be soft-bodied like ourselves. However, their design will have its origins in electrical analogues, as with the Octobot.

The Octobot is the brainchild a team of Harvard University researchers who recently published an article about it in Nature. Its body is modeled on the octopus and is composed of all soft body parts that were made using a combination of 3D printing, molding and soft lithography. Two sets of arms on either side of the Octobot move, taking turns under the control of a soft oscillator circuit. You can see it in action in the video below.

Octobot mechanical and electrical analogue circuits (credit: Michael Wehner at al./Nature)

As shown in the diagram, the fuel is a liquid hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) which the oscillator gets from one of two fuel reservoirs and feeds into one of two reaction chambers. In the oscillator, pinch valves act like JFETs. When fuel from one reservoir is flowing into one reaction chamber, one of the pinch valves pinches off the flow of fuel to the other reaction chamber. It’s not clear how but somehow or other that fuel flow is then pinched off by another pinch valve as fuel then flows from the other reservoir to the other reaction chamber.

The reaction chamber contains a small amount of platinum as a catalyst which reacts with the hydrogen peroxide to release a much larger volume of oxygen gas into actuators in the arms. Those actuators expand like balloons causing the arms to move. The reaction chambers are the analogues of amplifiers. Other analogues are check valves for diodes, vent orifices for resistors as well as other chambers which appear to be capacitors.

This is a proof of concept and as yet the Octobot doesn’t walk but the team hopes to make one that can crawl, swim and interact with its environment. When it does we look forward to it joining this other soft-bodied bot modeled after a stingray. It looks like our overlords might all come from the sea.

Here’s you can see the Octobot in action.

And here’s another video from Harvard demonstrating the chemical reaction between hydrogen peroxide and platinum that produces oxygen. ("Powering the Octobot: A chemical reaction")

ORIGINAL: HackADay

by: Steven Dufresne
September 7, 2016

Meet the First Artificial Animal

Scientists genetically engineered and 3-D-printed a biohybrid being, opening the door further for lifelike robots and artificial intelligence.

CREDIT: Getty Images

If you met this lab-created critter over your beach vacation, you'd swear you saw a baby ray. In fact, the tiny, flexible swimmer is the product of a team of diverse scientists. They have built the most successful artificial animal yet. This disruptive technology opens the door much wider for lifelike robots and artificial intelligence.

Like most disruption, it started with a simple idea. Kit Kevin Parker, PhD, a Harvard professor researching how to build a human heart, saw his daughter entranced by watching stingrays at the New England Aquarium in Boston. He wondered if he could engineer a muscle that could move in the same sinuous, undulating fashion. The quest for a material led to creating an artificial ray with a 3-D-printed rubber body at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University's Medical Center joined the team.

They reinforced the soft rubber body with a 3-D-printed gold skeleton so thin it functions like cartilage. Geneticists adapted rat heart cells so they could respond to light by contracting. Then, they were grown in a carefully arranged pattern on the rubber and around the gold skeleton.

The muscular circuitry is one of the most interesting parts of the research, and there's more about it in this video:

The birth of biohybrid beings

The new engineered animal responds to light so well scientists were able to guide it through an obstacle course 15 times its length using strong and weak light pulses.

The study authors write, "Our ray outperformed existing locomotive biohybrid systems in terms of speed, distance traveled, and durability (six days), demonstrating the potential of self-propelled, phototactically activated tissue-engineered robots."

What biohybrid mean for robots and artificial intelligence

Science of this type is fundamental for engineering special-purpose creations such as artificial worms that sniff out and eat cancer. Or bionic body parts for those who have suffered accidents or disease. Imagine having little swimmers in your system that rush to the site of a medical emergency such as a stroke. The promise of sensor-rich soft tissue frees robots to move more easily and yet not be cut off from needed input. Sensitized robot soft tissue could perform without the energy-sucking heaviness of metal or the artificial barrier of hard-plastic exoskeletons.

Thanks to disruptive, cross-disciplinary applied science like this, entrepreneurs in the next few years will be able to play on the border of what life is, what alive means, and what life can be. Expect to see companies use biohybrid beings to commercialize applications that solve some of the largest, and most lucrative, challenges we face today.

ORIGINAL: INC
BY LISA CALHOUN General partner, Valor Ventures@Lisa_Calhoun

A powerful message delivered to us by Leonardo DiCaprio and Janine Benyus.

"Biomimicry" - A film produced by Leonardo DiCaprio

Biomimicry is the practice of looking deeply into nature for solutions to engineering, design and other challenges in creating a long-term, sustainable world. In this episode of "This Planet:"

"Biomimicry" features science writer Janine Benyus, showing how mimicking nature solves some of our most pressing problems, from reducing carbon emissions to saving water. Then watch two short videos about applications of the biomimicy principles. 

“Cockroach Robots To The Rescue!" demonstrates what happens when a tiny robot is taught to move like a cockroach.

"Lotus 7.0" explores a work of art that mimics nature, by Dutch artist Dan Roosegaarde.

• “Biomimicry” was directed by Leila Conners, produced by Mathew Schmid and Bryony Schwan, with executive producers Roee Sharon Peled and George DiCaprio and sponsored by Leonardo DiCaprio via Tree Media. 
• “Cockroach Robots To The Rescue!” was produced by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally, UC Berkeley Poly-PEDAL Lab. 
• "Lotus 7.0” was produced by LeCube.com.

ORIGINAL: LinkTV

Robotic insect mimics Nature's extreme moves

An international team of Seoul National University and Harvard researchers looked to water strider insects to develop robots that jump off water’s surface

(SEOUL and BOSTON) — The concept of walking on water might sound supernatural, but in fact it is a quite natural phenomenon. Many small living creatures leverage water's surface tension to maneuver themselves around. One of the most complex maneuvers, jumping on water, is achieved by a species of semi-aquatic insects called water striders that not only skim along water's surface but also generate enough upward thrust with their legs to launch themselves airborne from it.

In this video, watch how novel robotic insects developed by a team of Seoul National University and Harvard scientists can jump directly off water's surface. The robots emulate the natural locomotion of water strider insects, which skim on and jump off the surface of water. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Now, emulating this natural form of water-based locomotion, an international team of scientists from Seoul National University, Korea (SNU), Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has unveiled a novel robotic insect that can jump off of water's surface. In doing so, they have revealed new insights into the natural mechanics that allow water striders to jump from rigid ground or fluid water with the same amount of power and height. The work is reported in the July 31 issue of Science.

"Water's surface needs to be pressed at the right speed for an adequate amount of time, up to a certain depth, in order to achieve jumping," said the study's co–senior author Kyu Jin Cho, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Biorobotics Laboratory at Seoul National University. "The water strider is capable of doing all these things flawlessly."

The water strider, whose legs have slightly curved tips, employs a rotational leg movement to aid it its takeoff from the water’s surface, discovered co–senior author Ho–Young Kim who is Professor in SNU's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of SNU's Micro Fluid Mechanics Lab. Kim, a former Wyss Institute Visiting Scholar, worked with the study’s co–first author Eunjin Yang, a graduate researcher at SNU's Micro Fluid Mechanics lab, to collect water striders and take extensive videos of their movements to analyze the mechanics that enable the insects to skim on and jump off water's surface.

It took the team several trial and error attempts to fully understand the mechanics of the water strider, using robotic prototypes to test and shape their hypotheses.

"If you apply as much force as quickly as possible on water, the limbs will break through the surface and you won’t get anywhere," said Robert Wood, Ph.D., who is a co–author on the study, a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member, the Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard Paulson School, and founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab.

But by studying water striders in comparison to iterative prototypes of their robotic insect, the SNU and Harvard team discovered that the best way to jump off of water is to maintain leg contact on the water for as long as possible during the jump motion.

"Using its legs to push down on water, the natural water strider exerts the maximum amount of force just below the threshold that would break the water’s surface," said the study's co-first author Je-Sung Koh, Ph.D., who was pursuing his doctoral degree at SNU during the majority of this research and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wyss Institute and the Harvard Paulson School.

Mimicking these mechanics, the robotic insect built by the team can exert up to 16 times its own body weight on the water's surface without breaking through, and can do so without complicated controls. Many natural organisms such as the water strider can perform extreme styles of locomotion – such as flying, floating, swimming, or jumping on water – with great ease despite a lack of complex cognitive skills.

From left, Seoul National University (SNU) professors Ho-Young Kim, Ph.D., and Kyu Jin Cho, Ph.D., observe the semi-aquatic jumping robotic insects developed by an SNU and Harvard team. Credit: Seoul National University.

"This is due to their natural morphology," said Cho. "It is a form of embodied or physical intelligence, and we can learn from this kind of physical intelligence to build robots that are similarly capable of performing extreme maneuvers without highly–complex controls or artificial intelligence."

The robotic insect was built using a "torque reversal catapult mechanism" inspired by the way a flea jumps, which allows this kind of extreme locomotion without intelligent control. It was first reported by Cho, Wood and Koh in 2013 in the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

For the robotic insect to jump off water, the lightweight catapult mechanism uses a burst of momentum coupled with limited thrust to propel the robot off the water without breaking the water's surface. An automatic triggering mechanism, built from composite materials and actuators, was employed to activate the catapult.

To produce the body of the robotic insect, "pop-up" manufacturing was used to create folded composite structures that self-assemble much like the foldable components that "pop–up" in 3D books. Devised by engineers at the Harvard Paulson School and the Wyss Institute, this ingenious layering and folding process enables the rapid fabrication of microrobots and a broad range of electromechanical devices.

"The resulting robotic insects can achieve the same momentum and height that could be generated during a rapid jump on firm ground – but instead can do so on water – by spreading out the jumping thrust over a longer amount of time and in sustaining prolonged contact with the water's surface," said Wood.

"This international collaboration of biologists and roboticists has not only looked into nature to develop a novel, semi–aquatic bioinspired robot that performs a new extreme form of robotic locomotion, but has also provided us with new insights on the natural mechanics at play in water striders," said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D.

Additional co–authors of the study include Gwang–Pil Jung, a Ph.D. candidate in SNU's Biorobotics Laboratory; Sun–Pill Jung, an M.S. candidate in SNU's Biorobotics Laboratory; Jae Hak Son, who earned his Ph.D. in SNU's Laboratory of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution; Sang–Im Lee, Ph.D., who is Research Associate Professor at SNU's Institute of Advanced Machines and Design and Adjunct Research Professor at the SNU's Laboratory of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution; and Piotr Jablonski, Ph.D., who is Professor in SNU's Laboratory of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution.

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea, Bio–Mimetic Robot Research Center funding from the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

IMAGE AND VIDEO AVAILABLE

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PRESS CONTACTS

Seoul National University College of Engineering

Kyu Jin Cho, kjcho@snu.ac.kr, +82 10-5616-1703

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University

Kat J. McAlpine, katherine.mcalpine@wyss.harvard.edu, +1 617-432-8266

Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applies Sciences

Leah Burrows, lburrows@seas.harvard.edu, +1 617-496-1351

The Seoul National University College of Engineering (SNU CE) (http://eng.snu.ac.kr/english/index.php) aims to foster leaders in global industry and society. In CE, professors from all over the world are applying their passion for education and research. Graduates of the college are taking on important roles in society as the CEOs of conglomerates, founders of venture businesses, and prominent engineers, contributing to the country's industrial development. Globalization is the trend of a new era, and engineering in particular is a field of boundless competition and cooperation. The role of engineers is crucial to our 21st century knowledge and information society, and engineers contribute to the continuous development of Korea toward a central role on the world stage. CE, which provides enhanced curricula in a variety of major fields, has now become the environment in which future global leaders are cultivated.

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University (http://wyss.harvard.edu) uses Nature's design principles to develop bioinspired materials and devices that will transform medicine and create a more sustainable world. Wyss researchers are developing innovative new engineering solutions for healthcare, energy, architecture, robotics, and manufacturing that are translated into commercial products and therapies through collaborations with clinical investigators, corporate alliances, and formation of new start–ups. The Wyss Institute creates transformative technological breakthroughs by engaging in high risk research, and crosses disciplinary and institutional barriers, working as an alliance that includes Harvard's Schools of Medicine, Engineering, Arts & Sciences and Design, and in partnership with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Boston University, Tufts University, and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, University of Zurich and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (http://seas.harvard.edu) serves as the connector and integrator of Harvard's teaching and research efforts in engineering, applied sciences, and technology. Through collaboration with researchers from all parts of Harvard, other universities, and corporate and foundational partners, we bring discovery and innovation directly to bear on improving human life and society.

ORIGINAL: Wyss Institute

Jul 30, 2015