Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing time on the morning of September 15, it is reported that at present, scientists at Johnannes Kepler University in Austria have recently developed a controllable software robot that can run, swim and jump at high speed. In the course of testing, the robot has reached a running speed of 70 ploids per second, and the result is amazing. Because even cheetahs (the fastest land animals on earth) can only reach a speed of 23 ploids per second!

Comparable to the robot "cheetah cub"

Although they may be the fastest software robots on earth, they should not be expected to reach absolute speed records, because the robot's body is only millimeter in size. Unlike traditional robots seen in factories, restaurants and science exhibitions, soft robots are made of flexible materials such as polymers and shape memory alloys (which change shape with temperature). Soft materials make robots function like living organisms or living tissues, whereas traditional robots are made of rigid materials such as plastics, aluminum and metals.

Scientists have long been trying to create software robots that are fast enough to run in extreme environments where other machines cannot work, and they can play an important role in the medical field. for example, speeding robots may replace invasive methods such as colonoscopy Doctors can use overspeed software robots to check for abnormalities in any body organs (such as the stomach) that are difficult for traditional diagnostic robots to examine.

The overspeed robot is made of a liquid metal alloy called galinstan, which is made of tin, gallium and indium. Galinstan is not usually used to make soft robots, which are usually made of silicon-based elastic materials. "the most important property of this material is that it is liquid at room temperature and has high electrical conductivity," said Dr. Mao Guoyong, lead author of the study and a soft matter physicist at Johnannes Kepler University. this will help create a soft, deformable coil structure. "

The researchers used liquid metal 3D printing technology to make galinstan coils, which are embedded in an elastic shell and use a driver to control their shape, resulting in a coil-shaped soft electromagnetic robot (SEMR) that provides fast drive and propulsion. The researchers are equipped with L-shaped or zigzag "feet" depending on the base on which the robot moves.

The soft electromagnetic robot is powered by a lithium polymer battery, and its ultra-fast motion is driven by an electromagnetic actuator (a component that converts electrical energy into mechanical energy). The actuator is a magnetic response element, so the fast-moving robot can be easily controlled by a static magnetic field. During the test, the tethered robot moved at a speed of 35 ploids per second on the plane and 70 ploids per second on the surface of a three-dimensional folded object. In addition, in underwater tests, they swim at a speed of 4.8 times the body length per second. Mao Guoyong pointed out that we think this is a promising new technology in the robot field, and it has great potential in the future. We cannot find any similar technology and use a soft functional material to accomplish many tasks at a very high speed.

The future of overspeed robots, the researchers also tested the speed of the prototype untethered soft robot. the results show that their swimming speed is 1.8 ploids per second, and the maximum moving speed on land is 2.1 ploids per second. They plan to further improve the efficiency and performance of the tethered robot.

Mao Guoyong and colleagues said that using liquid 3D printing technology to develop more millimeter-level software electromagnetic robots will help to build larger overspeed software robots in the future.

In recent years, scientists have devoted themselves to the development of software robots, and there have been many types of software robots, some of which can help us remove plastic garbage from the ocean, while others allow us to study and analyze the hot deserts on the surface of the moon and Mars. For all software robots, speed is a big limiting factor, overspeed software electromagnetic robot technology may break through this bottleneck.

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