A new air-powered robot can practically walk right off the 3-D printer.
The soft, 3-D printed robot doesn’t have any electronic parts. All it needs to move is an air canister. One day, robots like this could work underwater or in hazardous environments, its creators say.
Mechanical engineer Yichen Zhai led the work. He and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, gave their robot six flexible legs, like an insect. Each leg can move up and down or side to side. The whole thing is made from the same type of plastic that’s used to make hoses and shoe soles. The scientists 3-D printed it in one piece over the course of two and a half days.
Air from a canister flows through tiny tubes and chambers in the robot’s body to power it. As the pressure in each of these chambers changes, it opens and closes different tubes. That moves air into different sets of chambers, and the process starts again. This cycle of inflating and deflating chambers moves the robot’s legs to waddle forward.
Researchers published the design in the May issue of the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems.
The robot’s design is “quite interesting,” says Perla Maiolino. She wasn’t involved in building it, but she does work on other soft robots at the University of Oxford in England. Typically, making a robot involves designing different parts from different substances and assembling them, she says. But this one’s body is a single piece made with just one material. “It’s all together.”
This video, told from the perspective of the new robot, shows off the its electronics-free capabilities.
The robot may be soft, but its shape actually makes it quite sturdy. Having six legs helps it stay upright on rough and uneven ground. Whenever it takes a step, three of its legs move at once while the other three stay on the ground. This way, it doesn’t tip over easily. And because the design doesn’t contain any electronics, it’s waterproof. In experiments on the beach, the robot toddled right down into a deep puddle and resurfaced to continue along its way.
Electronics-free robots could one day work in areas that would thwart regular ones. “We are really pushing toward having untethered robots that can be deployed in very harsh environments,” Maiolino says. An “untethered” robot is one that doesn’t need to be connected to a power cord or controller.
A robot like the new six-legged walker could work in areas where electronics might be a fire risk, such as in mines. Or it might be used in space, where radiation could harm delicate electronic components.
But the new soft robot isn’t quite ready for these harsh conditions yet. The robot has to be able to move faster first, says Zhai. That will let it move farther on a single air canister. As of now, the insect-like robot creeps along at a leisurely pace of 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) per second. That’s a little faster than a snail, but slower than a turtle. A single canister of air can power it for about 80 seconds.
Zhai and his colleagues are currently building a faster version of their machine. The team also hopes to add a steering system or a way for the robot to dodge obstacles. Right now, it can only shuffle forward in a straight line. Controlling air flow through the robot could allow it to change direction in response to obstacles — sort of like a self-driving Roomba vacuum.
Until the robot gets these upgrades, it won’t be doing heavy-duty work. But in its current form, people can still enjoy interacting with it. “The robot is like a toy,” Zhai says. And it can be cheaply and easily 3-D printed. “If people love it, people can make it,” he says. “That’s enough.”
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Power Words
More About Power Words3-D: Short for three-dimensional. This term is an adjective for something that has features that can be described in three dimensions — height, width and length.
colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.
component: Something that is part of something else (such as pieces that go on an electronic circuit board or ingredients that go into a cookie recipe).
current: A fluid — such as of water or air — that moves in a recognizable direction. (in electricity) The flow of electricity or the amount of charge moving through some material over a particular period of time.
electronics: Devices that are powered by electricity but whose properties are controlled by the semiconductors or other circuitry that channel or gate the movement of electric charges.
engineer: A person who uses science and math to solve problems. As a verb, to engineer means to design a device, material or process that will solve some problem or unmet need.
environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).
fire: The burning of some fuel, creating a flame that releases light and heat.
insect: A type of arthropod that as an adult will have six segmented legs and three body parts: a head, thorax and abdomen. There are hundreds of thousands of insects, which include bees, beetles, flies and moths.
journal: (in science) A publication in which scientists share their research findings with experts (and sometimes even the public). Some journals publish papers from all fields of science, technology, engineering and math, while others are specific to a single subject. Peer-reviewed journals are the gold standard: They send all submitted articles to outside experts to be read and critiqued. The goal, here, is to prevent the publication of mistakes, fraud or work that is not novel or convincingly demonstrated.
mechanical: Having to do with the devices that move, including tools, engines and other machines (even, potentially, living machines); or something caused by the physical movement of another thing.
mechanical engineer: Someone trained in a research field that uses physics to study motion and the properties of materials to design, build and/or test devices.
plastic: Any of a series of materials that are easily deformable; or synthetic materials that have been made from polymers (long strings of some building-block molecule) that tend to be lightweight, inexpensive and resistant to degradation. (adj.) A material that is able to adapt by changing shape or possibly even changing its function.
pressure: Force applied uniformly over a surface, measured as force per unit of area.
radiation: (in physics) One of the three major ways that energy is transferred. (The other two are conduction and convection.) In radiation, electromagnetic waves carry energy from one place to another. Unlike conduction and convection, which need material to help transfer the energy, radiation can transfer energy across empty space.
risk: The chance or mathematical likelihood that some bad thing might happen. For instance, exposure to radiation poses a risk of cancer. Or the hazard — or peril — itself. (For instance: Among cancer risks that the people faced were radiation and drinking water tainted with arsenic.)
robot: A machine that can sense its environment, process information and respond with specific actions. Some robots can act without any human input, while others are guided by a human.
system: A network of parts that together work to achieve some function. For instance, the blood, vessels and heart are primary components of the human body's circulatory system. Similarly, trains, platforms, tracks, roadway signals and overpasses are among the potential components of a nation's railway system. System can even be applied to the processes or ideas that are part of some method or ordered set of procedures for getting a task done.
vacuum: Space with little or no matter in it. Laboratories or manufacturing plants may use vacuum equipment to pump out air, creating an area known as a vacuum chamber.
Skyler Ware is the 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow with Science News. She is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Caltech, where she studies chemical reactions that use or create electricity. Her writing has appeared in ZME Science and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s New Horizons Newsroom, among other outlets.
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