Students at Tokyo's University of Science have developed a new version of their muscle suit, a wearable robotic suit that assists the muscles when carrying out strenuous tasks.
The original version of the suit, which has been in production for several years, provides assistance to the arms and back but the new version provides assistance to the back only. That means it is lighter and more compact than the original model.
In a demonstration on Wednesday at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, a student wearing the suit was able to bend down and lift 15 kilograms of weights with the assistance of the robotic suit. Doing so without assistance would be difficult for many people and could cause injury to some.The university is still developing the suit and the model demonstrated on Wednesday was the first prototype. A production version is due some time in 2010.
With its greater assistance the original version of the suit will remain the most useful for heavier tasks.
In a demonstration of that model on Wednesday a student was asked to carry 10-kilogram bags of rice. With the suit switched off he could manage up to three bags before they started to get too heavy to carry, but with the suit switched on another two bags could be loaded into his arms. He quickly dropped the bags when the suit was switched off as without assistance it was too much weight to carry.
Such suits are being developed with an eye on assisting the physically challenged and workers carrying out physically demanding jobs.Earlier this year Toyota Motor unveiled similar robot-assisted suits and has been testing them at factories in Japan with workers who have to lift large or heavy sheets of metal or car parts.
Tokyo Students Design a New Robotic Muscle Suit
Design – The Oboe Humanoid Robot
Here is an interesting design concept from designer Arnaud Deloustal, the Oboe Humanoid Robot.
The Oboe Humanoid Robot is designed to hang out with the elderly so that it can absorb, experiences, knowledge etc.
Robot Design Delivers Packages Through Sewers
It’s 2020, and cities are so overcrowded that it’s impossible to deliver packages. UPS trucks have nowhere to double-park, and obnoxious bike messengers can’t even ride on pedestrian-jammed sidewalks. How, then, can important parcels reach their destinations in a squalid megalopolis of the future?
Through the sewers, of course.
The brainchild of designer Phillip Hermes, the Urban Mole is a capsule that travels through existing networks of underground pipes in order to transport packages as diverse as groceries, signed documents and any title that appears on Oprah’s Book Club. The Mole frees up our streets and roads for important matters, like mobilizing armies against the cyborgs that will inevitably plague our future cities.Able to move parcels as large as a shoebox, the Mole fully encapsulates its contents from surrounding waste water. In other words, the phrase “duty free shipping” will take on a whole new meaning.
The Urban Mole placed second in the VisionWorks contest, a logistics competition sponsored by Bayer MaterialScience (yes, they spell it one word like that) that asked participants to envision transportation solutions for 2020. The Urban Mole came in second to a building that grows food on its walls. Yeah, that’s cool, but it’s no undergound robot.
According to VisionWorks, “The pipe system is structured like a road network – the more traffic, the bigger the pipe.” Electric rails within the pipes provide juice for the Mole’s motors in a system that works like a miniature subway. Still more pipes run from drop-off points to delivery centers called MoleStations (again with the one-word construction) where customers can retrieve their items locally. The designer estimates that the average cross-town delivery could take place in less than 10 minutes.We like to think of the Urban Mole as a combination of Mr. McFeeley and the Ninja Turtles, skulking through sewers only to emerge when it can be of use to human civilization. But we pity the poor guy who has to open those capsules.
Democratizing Robot Design
Beneath the white paperboard petals of a robotic flower--which can open and close in response to changes in light, or catch a thrown ball detected by infrared sensors--lies a new standardized robotics platform called Qwerk. Developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Qwerk is designed so that almost anyone can use it to build his or her own custom Internet-enabled robot. It's a platform that CMU computer scientist Illah Nourbakhsh hopes will launch an open-source robotics movement and "democratize robot design for people intimidated by current techniques and parts."In contrast to current kits--most of which require a prefabricated set of parts--Qwerk is, according to the CMU robotics team, the first easy-to-use, low-cost robotics controller to house, in one place, power regulators, motor controllers, and hardware and rewritable software for a Wi-Fi Internet connection and simple programming. In the flower robot, the platform sits inside the blue wooden flowerpot. The CMU team has also developed some robot recipes for easy-to-build machines--like the paperboard flower--that can be assembled in a few hours with off-the-shelf parts. Together, the recipes and platform make up the Telepresence Robotic Kit (TeRK).
Why build a robotic flower? Well, beyond opening, closing, and catching things, it can play music, read the news aloud from its Internet connection, and strike poses according to its maker's mood. But the point is that you don't have to build the flower. "Ultimately, we hope people will riff on the recipes, making unusual and unexpected changes that take on a life of their own," thereby helping bring robotics into the mainstream, says Nourbakhsh.
With Qwerk and its catalogue of design recipes, the TeRK project joins the wider effort to create a greater variety of robots beyond the traditional walkers and rovers. "In the past, designers haven't paid enough attention to creating nonmobile robots that engage users' imaginations," says Mitchel Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT's Media Lab. Resnick's group has developed LEGO Mindstorms and PicoCrickets, two construction kits similar in purpose to the TeRK.
Human-Centered Robotics
In recent years, there has been great interest generated in the emerging fields of service and medical robots. These applications are part of a growing area of human-centered robotics. This area involves the close interaction between robotic manipulation systems and human beings, including direct human-manipulator contact. In such applications, traditional figures of merit such as bandwidth, maximum force and torque capability, and reachable workspace, do not fully encompass the range of metrics which define the requirements of such systems. Specifically, human-centered robotic systems must consider the requirement of safety in addition to the traditional metrics of performance. Thus, it is the challenge of human-centered robotics to successfully blend often competing requirements of safety and performance.
The Stanford Robotics Laboratory has initiated a research effort to design a human-centered, inherently-safe robotic manipulator. While the design and development effort include all aspects of manipulator design, the primary focus has been on addressing the limitations of the mechanical system and its impact on safety and performance. We have focused on efforts to reduce the manipulator weight and inertia to improve its inherent safety characteristics while maintaining performance levels expected of modern manipulators.
DECMMA Actuation Approach
A critical component to this work has been the development of a new actuation approach that seeks to relocate the major source of actuation effort from the joint to the base of the manipulator. This can substantially reduce the effective inertia of the overall manipulator by isolating the reflected inertia of the actuator while greatly reducing the overall weight of the manipulator. Performance is maintained with small actuators collocated with the joints. Our approach partitions the torque generation into low and high frequency components and distributes these components to the arm location where they are most effective.
We refer to the overall approach as Distributed Elastically Coupled Macro Mini Parallel Actuation (DECMMA). The DECMMA approach is analogous to the design of robotic manipulators for use in zero gravity. Under such conditions, gravity induced torques do not exist. Joint actuators provide torques related only to the task, such as trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection, both of which are primarily medium to high frequency in content. We achieve the zero gravity analogy by compensating for gravity torques and low frequency torques using the low frequency actuator located at the base of the manipulator. With the effects of gravity and low frequency torques compensated, joint torque requirements become similar to those encountered by a zero gravity robotic manipulator. However, unlike robotic manipulators designed for space applications, the DECMMA joint actuators do not require a large gear reducer to achieve the required torque and power densities. Thus, the impedance of DECMMA approach, and its resulting safety characteristics, is superior to that of current space robotic manipulators.
- Design of the robot
My primary inspiration for the design was [1]. The source does not provide many details of the mechanical construction and dimensions so I had to experiment but it wasn’t hard. The drawing of my final design is below. The dimensions depend on the size of the servos used. I used standard size servos which yields robot about 12 cm long and 9 cm wide. It would be interesting to use smaller servos and make a tiny “spider” robot.
I choose to develop my own controller board instead of using a commercial one, such as BasicX. This was mainly because of my desire to get some experience with Atmel microcontrollers and also to cut down the price. Typical controller costs about 100 USD while the Atmel Tiny 2313 MCU costs about 4 dollars and with all the other parts the price of the board is still below 15 USD.
Basic theory
Don’t worry, I don’t like theory any more than you do, so this will be just brief description of the things you could find helpful.
The servos
Servo is used primarily in radio controlled models (airplanes, cars, ships etc.) but they are also very popular in robotics. The advantage is wide choice of sizes and strengths, low price and easy control with microcontrollers. There are tiny servos weighting some 5 grams but also huge ones with metal gears able to lift several kilograms on its lever.
Cheapest servo can be obtained for about $10 and for our purpose it will suffice. The prototype robot uses Hitec HS300 servos which are about 10 years old, have served their duty in various radio controlled airplanes and survived several crashes, yet they still work very well. From today’s market Hitec HS311 can be a good choice, but you can also use any of the less-known brands without problem.
Important servo parameters are:
Suppy voltage – 5 V (max 6V for some types), required current is about 1A
Strength – given in N . cm, for standard size servo typically 30 N . cm.
Speed - given in degrees per second, typically about 0,15 s for 60 degree travel
Standard size servo is 40x20x36 mm and weights about 50 grams. There is cable with 3 strands, usually red (+), black (ground) and yellow or orange (signal for the servo).
Position of the servo lever is controlled by input signal which should have frequency of 50 Hz and pulses with length between 1 and 2 ms. change of the pulse length changes the position of the servo lever. See the picture:
The mechanical calculations for the servos in this kind of robot can be found in [1]. For me it was sufficient to find out that the robot with 10 years old servos walks. How long the servos will survive is a different question, but it doesn’t seem to me that they would be overloaded when the robot is walking.
How to Design a Robot
Robots have long captured our imagination. They have taken on many forms over the years. However, working robots are normally designed not as a multitasking device that resembles a human being, but a device that is created to perform one or two specific tasks with a high degree of efficiency. If you are handy with electronics and want to try your hand at designing your own robot to handle some simple task, here are some ideas on how to do just that
Instructions
Basic Knowledge of Electronics
Step1:
Define the function or functions that the robot will perform. Knowing what the device is to accomplish is the first step in determining what elements must go into the design. For example, a robot that is expected to pick up objects will need to be designed with an arm mechanism. A robot that is expected to sweep or vacuum will require some type of wheels or locomotion mechanism to move across the floor.
Step 2:
Create a rough sketch of the robot’s exterior. The design does not have to be perfect at this point. A rough sketch will serve as the basis for the general look of the device that you can refine as you move deeper into the project.
Step 3;
Determine the internal components that will necessary to make the robot operational. This may include circuit boards, wiring, and various other components. Compile a list on a notepad of the necessary components and how they would relate to one another. Knowing what you need for the internal workings will make it easier to determine how big the body of the robot will have to be in order to include all necessary elements.
Step 4:
Address the layout of the interior components for the robot. The placement of components may be influenced by some of the exterior features. If the robot is equipped with red flashing eyes, then the circuitry and sockets for the small bulbs will need to be placed in line with the location of the eyes on the exterior of the device. Determining the placement of interior components can usually be done by creating cross section drawings of the components within an exposed area of the outer shell of the shell.
Step 5:
Enhance the exterior of the robot. Once the interior components are placed, you can begin to determine the color scheme and any esthetic elements that will work along with the functionality of the final design.
Step 6:
Develop the working blueprint for the robot. Using the sketches and the list of components, begin to create the blueprints for the creation of the shell, all exterior features such as arms or sensor lights, and also the exact layout and connectivity between the internal components. The blueprints will provide the basis for the purchase of necessary materials to build the robot based on your design