Kind: captions
Language: en
there are robots the size of
bees others that can jump on water and
some that are powered by tiny combustion
engines the size of a penny one day they
could work in swarms they could save
your life or even spy on
you we got access to the best micro
robotics labs in the world the flip to
learn how these robots work and what are
they for this video is sponsored by
onshape
this is a tiny Yellow Submarine
underwater it can move around by
flapping these miniature Wings Nine
times per
second but you can use those same Wings
when the submarine is out of the water
only now you have to Flap them 250 times
a second to make it fly so this robot
can do both it can fly and swim but
since it weighs only 175 mg about the
mass of two Cheerios surface tension is
a problem that's a consequence of
physics at a smaller scale the surface
tension is like a wall that blocks the
transition process this happens because
water molecules are slightly polar
groups of these molecules pull in all
directions but at the surface there's no
water above so the pull is only sideways
and downwards this imbalance creates
strong cohesive forces that compress the
surface into a tightly packed layer
making it difficult to
break this is the same effect that lets
water striders walk on on the surfaces
of ponds and
lakes this other robot weighs only 68 mg
and by using a spring mechanism that
mimics a flea's leg it can jump without
breaking the water's surface just like a
water
Strider it's like there's Solid ground
below now that's great if you want to
stay on top of the water but this
barrier can also be a problem if you
want to go underwater
to escape this trap the submarine splits
water into hydrogen and oxygen and then
stores these gases in a buoyancy chamber
it does this because the wings are super
fragile if they started flapping while
the robot was still trapped underwater
they would break right off so the
buoyancy from the gas helps bring the
fragile parts of the robot out of the
water but the robot is still stuck in
that top layer of surface tension so a
sparker in inside the chamber ignites
the gas and the explosion breaks the
surface tension and shoots the robot 30
cm into the
air and once it's free this robot can
fly this robot found a different way to
break through the surface tension it
uses these large water repellent copper
pads on its feet to walk on the
water but when it needs to dive beneath
it applies 600 volts to those pads which
creates a positive charge that attracts
water molecules to it and breaks the
hydrophobic barrier and that allows it
to sink on
command then once submerged it can walk
underwater both of these robots were
made by Dr Kevin Chan at MIT we looking
at the flight room and this is where we
do all of our flight experiment as you
can see has motion capture
cameras this lab is one of the only
places in the world where robots this
small attempt flight Okay so because
this robot's so small it has such low
inertia right so you're saying that it
could flip faster than any other drone
in the world Beyond 7,000 de per second
I mean you can actually hit the button
you let me hit the button yeah I'd love
to ready yep okay 3 2
one you know who
[Laughter]
F getting these robots flying is tough I
mean they're the size of bees so the
internal mechanisms have to be even
smaller like the parts of a watch
y components have to be precise to
within five microns that's a tenth the
width of a human hair in the summer we
have those very big flies sipping by in
the lab and I was making the stain of oh
they're just showing
off take two 3 2
1 woo
yeah that fli go I
[Music]
got so these Bots fly but not like birds
I mean they don't soar instead they have
to use a whole lot more energy flapping
their wings hundreds of times per second
so why do they do that well it comes
down to this scale phenomenon larger
objects typically have less surface area
relative to their volume and that's
important let's just approximate a flyer
by a cube let's say it's 10 cm on a side
well then that would have a volume of 10
x 10 x 10 or 1,000 cubic cm and it would
have an area of 10x 10x 6 sides 600
square cm so the surface area to volume
ratio would be 6: 1 but now imagine we
have a much smaller flyer that is just
one cubic cm in volume well its surface
area is going to be 1X 1 * 6 that is 6
square cm so that's going to be 10 times
the surface area to volume ratio it's
going to have a surface area to volume
ratio of 6 to 1 now why is that so
important well it's because drag depends
on surface area so if you have more
surface area to volume well you're going
to have a lot more drag and also at that
small scale you'll be much lighter
relative to that drag so you're not
going to have as much inertia so you'll
get pushed around more by the air so you
can't just soar through it like a bird
and that's why bees and other insects
flap their wings a
lot what they're doing is generating
swirls of air above the top of the wing
and those vortices create low pressure
zones when combined with a high pressure
below the wing that is what generates
lift so they're pushed up into that low
pressure region by flapping their wings
back and
forth this robot was inspired by seeds
from a maple
tree their unique shape creates the same
swirling vortices above the seeds
Leading
Edge and as they fall they spin and
generate surprisingly high
lift these seeds are still just falling
but if you add miniature electric rotors
to the ends of each wing tip on this
robot then it can generate enough lift
to
[Music]
fly but this robot isn't quite insect
scale it actually weighs about 50 times
more than the robo bees in Kevin's lab
so to power something that small you
can't just use electric motors I mean
the magnets and coils don't scale down
effectively to such a small
size so to to power the first robab bees
they had wings driven by special
crystals called pel electric
crystals by applying a voltage across
the crystal they contract slightly but
only around. 1% not nearly enough of a
deflection to make a robot
fly so roboticist designed a chassis
that mechanically amplifies the motion
30 times if you then turn the voltage on
and off 120 times per second the robo be
flaps its wings and flies
[Music]
but there is a downside to piso electric
crystals which is they're fragile even a
small impact to the wings and the
Crystal cracks and the robo be stops
working so at MIT they are building
their Robo bees differently they're so
confident that it will survive being
dropped that they're going to let me
throw it off of a building so I mean
here we
go okay we got to go see come on
[Music]
I mean it looks pretty good this is
amazing like H how does this thing
survive I have no idea well these robots
have a secret ingredient so put it scale
zero it instead of using pisos to drive
the wings these bees use soft polymers
they effectively work like tiny muscles
let's drop it here they take a polymer
and they coat each side with carbon Nano
tubes that creates two effective
conducting plates so if you apply
opposite charges to these plates that
pulls them together stretching out the
polymer but if like charges are applied
to both plates they repel and so the
polymer shrinks and if we roll up layers
like this into a tube we can amplify the
force they generate it stretches up to
25% of its length by cycling the voltage
hundreds of times per second these
muscles Drive the robo's wi
when you shrink down to smaller scale
your flapping frequency goes up higher
so we at the 400 HZ range just a right
in between a honey bee and a mosquito
yes this flexible muscle can take bumps
and scrapes and keep working but if it's
pierced by a needle the carbon nanot
tubes get pulled in and then the plates
touch causing a short circuit that
renders the muscle useless but the
scientists have even found a way around
this when high current is cycled the
carbon nanot tubes that are touching
burn off and so the muscle
self-heals Kevin and his team even
invented a process to perform laser
surgery on the robot you're creating
smaller defect around a very very big
defect and then by isolating the small
defect you're using the small defect to
isolate the big defect so that was what
we call the laser assisted clearing
process one robot was really tested to
its limits its artificial muscle muscle
was pierced by Cactus needles and hit by
a laser beam and it could still
fly but these muscles are energy
intensive and for robots at this scale
that have to be so light there's no room
for extra batteries luckily there is
another way to get around that's a
jumping flying
robot this Robo be conserves energy by
hopping this Tech was used on another
drone at the City University of Hong
Kong normally this drone can only fly
continuously for 6.3 minutes but with
the hopping attachment it can keep
moving for 50 minutes nearly 10 times
[Music]
longer scientists believe this could be
even more effective in Low Gravity low
air resistance environments like Mars so
it would be perfect for an Ingenuity
version
2.0 but Micro robots are already being
used
today every day planes complete hundreds
of thousand thousand of flights and most
of them have multiple turbine engines
now a crack in a turbine can be
catastrophic so manufacturers inspect
them every 3,000 flight Cycles or 180
days but inspections cost tens of
thousands of dollars and can take a
whole day that's where this cockroach
inspired robot from earlier Hammer comes
in it's incredibly fast it can run 10.5
body lengths per second speaking in
relative terms that's faster than a
horse and and it's versatile its special
foot pads can apply a voltage to
polarized metal surfaces creating an
opposite charge underneath its feet and
that's how it's able to stick to metal
surfaces similar to a balloon sticking
to a wall after you rub it on your hair
Rolls-Royce and Harvard are working to
put Hammer inside of engines to inspect
for Turbine cracks even upside down and
since its mass is so small adhesion
forces are much stronger relative to its
weight so hammer can get into some tight
spaces and that can be pretty
useful one of the first times that
robots were deployed in an emergency
situation was during the 9/11 search for
survivors at Ground Zero Unfortunately
they didn't turn out to be that helpful
they were big and expensive and they'd
get stuck three different types
inspected eight sections of Rebel but
none found survivors so an ideal rescue
robot should be able to navigate tight
spaces with stand damage and debris
operate across varied environments and
be inexpensive enough to be replaced if
destroyed the material cost is actually
quite low for making the robot the the
the human labor is high but in terms of
the material couple of dollars per robot
it's really enough yeah right yes so the
idea is to deploy swarms of insect sized
microbots to search for survivors in
disaster zones
[Music]
but I understand when I say swarm you
might get a little worried I mean swarms
of miniature Killer Robots are straight
out of dystopian sci-fi think the hunter
Seeker from Dune or the killer robot
bees from Black Mirror you might be
familiar with that like famous black
mirror TV episode where all like the
bees yeah when that came out everybody
that I had ever met in my entire life
sent me a text message it was like hey
bro you seen
this but this idea isn't so farfetched
in the early 2000s bees were dying off
it's called colony collapse disorder
Congress is holding hearings even the
vice president has been briefed in fact
the whole Robo be project started with
the goal of replacing the bees
thankfully that idea didn't last long
bees can do much better jobs in terms of
pollination than those robot much more
cheaply to pollinate you need a huge
colony of Beast to do those effectively
also from an Environmental Protection
perspective I think it doesn't make
sense to replace bees with robotics bees
from a cost effective perspective and
also from the perspective of you know if
you have so much money why why making
those bees and protecting the real bees
okay so they won't replace the bees but
I can still easily imagine a world where
these same robots that are supposed to
help in a disaster are secretly being
used to spy on
me I mean it's a bug that would
literally look like a bug that's
terrifying is there any fear from you
about what they could be used for like
ethically we really focus on the
fundamental science and solving the fun
technical problems and as a society in
general we all should think about
collectively how to prevent those new
technology from doing harm but we're
getting a bit ahead of ourselves I mean
most of the robots we've seen aren't
able to spy on us in fact they're not
even fully autonomous we have offboard
uh sens from those cameras you have
outboard power from those and outboard
computation what what you see today is
everything is offboard hopefully in 5
years then we can combine both sensing
autonomy and power autonomy and that's
the longer term goal Harvard's Robo be
has managed short bursts of untethered
autonomous flight so it's fair to say we
aren't that far off from robot insects
operating freely around us still there
is a limit to how far these robots can
go on just batteries
batteries need shielding to prevent
damage short circuits and leaks and the
thing is as batteries are scaled down
this shielding has to stay about the
same thickness so that means smaller
batteries become increasingly
inefficient and that's ignoring that the
energy to weight ratio of batteries is
just fundamentally lower than that of
chemical
fuels at the insect scale every
milligram
matters we just said like let's just
sail past all of that and just use a a
video game cheat code and and just power
our robot with the smallest explosions
possible and put two tiny internal
combustion engines on board it and it
works and it sounds like a combustion
engine which is probably the my favorite
part of
it Cameron's Penny sized engine runs on
a constant stream of methane and oxygen
this is fed into a chamber where it's
ignited by a spark and so it combusts
releasing a burst of energy the hot
gases rapidly expand pushing against a
flexible polymer membrane that acts like
a
piston so the membrane moves as the
piston and then instead of having to
like have any sort of elaborate system
that brings it back down because it just
naturally is elastic it it sort of has
its own restoring force that was our our
clever little Innovation as the membrane
shrinks back it vents the exhaust gases
allowing the cycle to repeat despite the
continuous flow of methane and oxygen
the fuel Co line never catches fire
that's because as explosions get smaller
their volume shrinks much faster than
their surface area this causes them to
lose heat more quickly to their
surroundings in Cameron's robot only a
small amount of gas Burns at a time so
heat quickly escapes into the fuel line
cooling the gas and stopping the flame
from traveling back up the
line with just two of these combustion
Chambers on a little robot one for the
front legs and one for the back Cameron
can control its heading you can actuate
just one of the two sides at a given
time if you want because both sides are
operational so if we spark in both sides
it'll move straight but if we just do
one or the other it'll pivot and this
robot is super powerful for its size it
weighs 1.6 G which is about as much as a
gummy bear
weighs it can jump like 2 fet in the air
approximately it can carry 22 times its
body weight which is about what a
cockroach or a lot of beetles can do
we'll be able to put a fuel tank you
know uh micro Electronics sensors a
camera battery and still have weight
left over to go and and this thing will
still chug
along that's the future that's the
goal scientists have created robots that
can do what some insects do and there
are clear applications for this work but
for these roboticists these self-labeled
Misfits that's not what it's all about
if it's about application we should all
like make a startup and try to like
think about what we can do to make money
right we think there are nice
applications like inspection and search
and rescue but I would say as a research
lab we are mostly driven by curiosity I
that's a very honest
answer so
cool if you are someone who designs
Hardware like these robots mini or
Mighty you know that you need to create
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video and I want to thank you for
watching so cool