Kind: captions
Language: en
I'm just continuously Amazed by how
rugged we are when I go jogging for
example I'm counting on that seamless
integration between my muscles firing my
nervous tissue just processing all the
signals and Sensations like the skin on
my feet being able to detect impact um I
mean it all has to to come together um
and we don't even think about it unless
your Carmel maiti who thinks about it
pretty much all the time because he
makes robots not the rigid ones you
might be thinking of but rather robots
that are more like us flexible strong
and capable of sensing their
surroundings sof to robots in the future
will be really uh necessary tool or
machines in your daily life and these
soft robots could be real game
changers they could help us in our old
age and assist with just even basic
motor tests like just walking from room
to room or going up the stairs we can
expect to see soft biologically inspired
robots that could be used and say
natural disaster relief they could kind
of go through rubble and kind of squeeze
through really tight fitting spaces in
ways that conventional robots or or
humans can't do you could imagine using
some of soft robotic element to function
as a kind of mechanical replacement for
vital biological organs you know say a
heart valve okay so let's see one of
these things in action this is a robotic
arm that young lay Park and his students
have built the main purpose is to help
your daily activities like eating or
showering or retrieving objects the
overall design is a lot like your arm a
biological arm it's got a rigid skeleton
that's powered by a set of soft
artificial muscles we use compressed air
to contract these muscles and these
muscles are connected to different
joints so it
different joint Motions like a human arm
this is one approach to creating a soft
robot another is to make it entirely out
of soft materials this is a soft robotic
finger the finger is surrounded by
artificial tendons the rigidity of the
tendons which are those black vertical
stripes is controlled by an electric
current flip one switch to run the
current through one set of tendons and
the robot finger when pumped up with a
bit of air bends to the left flip the
other switch and the finger bends to the
right we're looking at a soft switch
unlike typical rigid components its
elastic properties allow it to kind of
deform and contort simply adjusting the
voltage coursing through this flap
causes it to bend at first something
like this might be implanted into the
human body say to act as an artificial
muscle or heart valve but once they're
developed and refined Parts like this
one and others that I'm about to show
you could eventually be the building
blocks of a completely soft robot
now these flexible materials are just
the beginning to make a robot you also
need circuitry to relay signals from the
surrounding world and for a soft robot
that circuitry has to be flexible too so
instead of rigid metal the folks here
use a type of metal that's liquid at
room temperature and it can detect if
it's being
stretched
touched or pressed this is basically an
effort towards making artificial skin
for robotics you could use this as you
know a wearable keypad case in point I
have a wearable Arrow pad when I put my
finger on it I'm completing an
electrical circuit and so it sens a
signal to the computer and allows me to
play theis and here's another example a
sensor surface on the human body that
responds to touch input today's soft
robots are fairly small and what they do
is fairly limited and yet you need to
have imagination before long young lay
Park imagines engineering a flexible
robotic skin to cover your entire body
kind of like a special wet suit so you
have a stretchable and elastic suit you
wear it's not going to be like a
superhero suit which generates a really
high force and a lot of power but the
sensors embedded in your suit detect
your body motions and if you need to
generate a little more force that suit
can generate your Force robots are
machines that assist humans over the
next few decades we could have we will
have robots that that are soft and and a
lot more like their biological
counterparts the research teams at
Carnegie melon are taking a variety of
approaches to embrace this future and if
the robots get soft enough they might
just Embrace us back
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