Tag Archives: expands
#439604 Elephant Robotics Expands Lightweight ...
This article is sponsored by Elephant Robotics.
Elephant Robotics is well known for its line of innovative products that help enhance manufacturing, assembly, education, and more. In 2020, Elephant Robotics released the world's smallest 6-axis robot arm: myCobot. Since its release, myCobot has sold over 5,000 units to clients all over the world.
Following the footprint of myCobot and to fulfill the demand from more users, Elephant Robotics is now expanding its Lightweight Robot Arm Product Line.
myCobot provides an answer for affordable commercial robot arms
The idea of a lightweight commercial robot arm has been raised for a long time, but factory and assembly lines are still the most common scenes for robot arms. A traditional robot arm is usually heavy, loud, and difficult to program. Most importantly, the price is too high, and the cost recovery cycle becomes unacceptably long. These issues have limited robot arms from entering commercial settings.
Elephant Robotics' myCobot series, for the first time, provides an answer for all these issues.
The myCobot series of lightweight 6-axis robots has a payload from 250 grams to 2 kilograms and a working range from 280 to 600 mm. The innovative all-in-one design from
Elephant Robotics allows these robots to get rid of the traditional control box and have all controllers and panels integrated into the base.
myCobot series robots are all open source and support various ways of programming and are super easy for beginners to use and adapt to their needs.
• myCobot 280, as the knock-out product, is an open-source robot arm with a 250 g payload. It is an ideal platform for learning ROS, V-rep, myBlockly, Matlab, CAN, and 485 bus-mastering control.
• myCobot 320 has a payload of 1 kg payload and a continuous working time of 8 hours. myCobot 320 provides an unprecedented option for the service industry.
• myCobot Pro 600, as the top-level product of myCobot series products, features 600 mm arm reach and 2 kg payload. It is equipped withy three harmonic drives that are being used on the commercial robot for the first time. myCobot Pro 600 is expanding the use of robot arms to medical, catering, manufacturing, and other industries, which have not benefited from automation.
The myCobot series of robotic arms provides usability, security, and low-noise. Compared to other options, it's a highly competitive choice for a wide range of automation applications. It allows quick deployment and enables human-robot collaboration. It's safe, increases efficiency for businesses, and is a cost-effective solution.
Traditional industry + robot arm?
The myCobot series can be used for commercial scenarios including production, manufacturing, and assembly. For some more creative ideas, check out the following videos:
to make coffee, to make matcha, provide a robot message, or to help a photographer work.
myCobot Pro as a photographer assistant.
Elephant Robotics
The myCobot series can also be used for scientific research, educational purposes, and medical purposes.
A couple of other unique examples include using it as a smart barista to expand a coffee business; to provide an excellent experience of robot massage; to help in a photographic studio for more accurate and stable precision work; to produce efficient line work and to help print out photos continuously for the perfect combination of artistic creation and robotics.
It can also work as an assistant in a workshop for human and robot collaboration and infinite creativity. Its all-in-one design also make it a great fit for automated guided vehicle (AGV) solutions.
All of the products in the myCobot line are open source and work with Elephant Robotics' myStudio, a one-stop platform for all of the robots from
Elephant Robotics. This platform provides continuous updates of firmware, video tutorials, and provides maintenance and repair information (e.g. tutorials, Q&A, etc.). Users can also buy several accessories targeted at robotic collaboration applications as well.
Open source robot arm
myCobot product line offers various software interfaces and adapt to the majority of development platforms. myCobot product line can be integrated with applications like the Robot Operating System (ROS) and MoveIt, and various APIs, including Python, C++, C#, Java, and Arduino. It also supports multiple ways of programming, including myBlockly and RoboFlow.
Elephant aims to provide the best development experience and lower the development barriers to allow more users to have their hand on myCobots to create useful applications.
“With the new myCobot series products, we are happy to enable customers to create more efficiently on a larger scale than ever before,” said
Elephant Robotics cofounder and CEO Joey Song. “We have helped customers from different industries to achieve automation upgrading like the Tumor Thermal Therapy Robot in medical use.”
“We are hoping to allow more people to use our latest robotic arm,” he added, ” to create and enhance their businesses and maker work.” Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437723 Minuscule RoBeetle Turns Liquid Methanol ...
It’s no secret that one of the most significant constraints on robots is power. Most robots need lots of it, and it has to come from somewhere, with that somewhere usually being a battery because there simply aren’t many other good options. Batteries, however, are famous for having poor energy density, and the smaller your robot is, the more of a problem this becomes. And the issue with batteries goes beyond the battery itself, but also carries over into all the other components that it takes to turn the stored energy into useful work, which again is a particular problem for small-scale robots.
In a paper published this week in Science Robotics, researchers from the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, demonstrate RoBeetle, an 88-milligram four legged robot that runs entirely on methanol, a power-dense liquid fuel. Without any electronics at all, it uses an exceptionally clever bit of mechanical autonomy to convert methanol vapor directly into forward motion, one millimeter-long step at a time.
It’s not entirely clear from the video how the robot actually works, so let’s go through how it’s put together, and then look at the actuation cycle.
Image: Science Robotics
RoBeetle (A) uses a methanol-based actuation mechanism (B). The robot’s body (C) includes the fuel tank subassembly (D), a tank lid, transmission, and sliding shutter (E), bottom side of the sliding shutter (F), nickel-titanium-platinum composite wire and leaf spring (G), and front legs and hind legs with bioinspired backward-oriented claws (H).
The body of RoBeetle is a boxy fuel tank that you can fill with methanol by poking a syringe through a fuel inlet hole. It’s a quadruped, more or less, with fixed hind legs and two front legs attached to a single transmission that moves them both at once in a sort of rocking forward and up followed by backward and down motion. The transmission is hooked up to a leaf spring that’s tensioned to always pull the legs backward, such that when the robot isn’t being actuated, the spring and transmission keep its front legs more or less vertical and allow the robot to stand. Those horns are primarily there to hold the leaf spring in place, but they’ve got little hooks that can carry stuff, too.
The actuator itself is a nickel-titanium (NiTi) shape-memory alloy (SMA), which is just a wire that gets longer when it heats up and then shrinks back down when it cools. SMAs are fairly common and used for all kinds of things, but what makes this particular SMA a little different is that it’s been messily coated with platinum. The “messily” part is important for a reason that we’ll get to in just a second.
The way that the sliding vent is attached to the transmission is the really clever bit about this robot, because it means that the motion of the wire itself is used to modulate the flow of fuel through a purely mechanical system. Essentially, it’s an actuator and a sensor at the same time.
One end of the SMA wire is attached to the middle of the leaf spring, while the other end runs above the back of the robot where it’s stapled to an anchor block on the robot’s rear end. With the SMA wire hooked up but not actuated (i.e., cold rather than warm), it’s short enough that the leaf spring gets pulled back, rocking the legs forward and up. The last component is embedded in the robot’s back, right along the spine and directly underneath the SMA actuator. It’s a sliding vent attached to the transmission, so that the vent is open when the SMA wire is cold and the leaf spring is pulled back, and closed when the SMA wire is warm and the leaf spring is relaxed. The way that the sliding vent is attached to the transmission is the really clever bit about this robot, because it means that the motion of the wire itself is used to modulate the flow of fuel through a purely mechanical system. Essentially, it’s an actuator and a sensor at the same time.
The actuation cycle that causes the robot to walk begins with a full fuel tank and a cold SMA wire. There’s tension on the leaf spring, pulling the transmission back and rocking the legs forward and upward. The transmission also pulls the sliding vent into the open position, allowing methanol vapor to escape up out of the fuel tank and into the air, where it wafts past the SMA wire that runs directly above the vent.
The platinum facilitates a reaction of the methanol (CH3OH) with oxygen in the air (combustion, although not the dramatic flaming and explosive kind) to generate a couple of water molecules and some carbon dioxide plus a bunch of heat, and this is where the messy platinum coating is important, because messy means lots of surface area for the platinum to interact with as much methanol as possible. In just a second or two the temperature of the SMA wire skyrockets from 50 to 100 ºC and it expands, allowing the leaf spring about 0.1 mm of slack. As the leaf spring relaxes, the transmission moves the legs backwards and downwards, and the robot pulls itself forward about 1.2 mm. At the same time, the transmission is closing off the sliding vent, cutting off the supply of methanol vapor. Without the vapor reacting with the platinum and generating heat, in about a second and a half, the SMA wire cools down. As it does, it shrinks, pulling on the leaf spring and starting the cycle over again. Top speed is 0.76 mm/s (0.05 body-lengths per second).
An interesting environmental effect is that the speed of the robot can be enhanced by a gentle breeze. This is because air moving over the SMA wire cools it down a bit faster while also blowing away any residual methanol from around the vents, shutting down the reaction more completely. RoBeetle can carry more than its own body weight in fuel, and it takes approximately 155 minutes for a full tank of methanol to completely evaporate. It’s worth noting that despite the very high energy density of methanol, this is actually a stupendously inefficient way of powering a robot, with an estimated end-to-end efficiency of just 0.48 percent. Not 48 percent, mind you, but 0.48 percent, while in general, powering SMAs with electricity is much more efficient.
However, you have to look at the entire system that would be necessary to deliver that electricity, and for a robot as small as RoBeetle, the researchers say that it’s basically impossible. The lightest commercially available battery and power supply that would deliver enough juice to heat up an SMA actuator weighs about 800 mg, nearly 10 times the total weight of RoBeetle itself. From that perspective, RoBeetle’s efficiency is actually pretty good.
Image: A. Kitterman/Science Robotics; adapted from R.L.T./MIT
Comparison of various untethered microrobots and bioinspired soft robots that use different power and actuation strategies.
There are some other downsides to RoBeetle we should mention—it can only move forwards, not backwards, and it can’t steer. Its speed isn’t adjustable, and once it starts walking, it’ll walk until it either breaks or runs out of fuel. The researchers have some ideas about the speed, at least, pointing out that increasing the speed of fuel delivery by using pressurized liquid fuels like butane or propane would increase the actuator output frequency. And the frequency, amplitude, and efficiency of the SMAs themselves can be massively increased “by arranging multiple fiber-like thin artificial muscles in hierarchical configurations similar to those observed in sarcomere-based animal muscle,” making RoBeetle even more beetle-like.
As for sensing, RoBeetle’s 230-mg payload is enough to carry passive sensors, but getting those sensors to usefully interact with the robot itself to enable any kind of autonomy remains a challenge. Mechanically intelligence is certainly possible, though, and we can imagine RoBeetle adopting some of the same sorts of systems that have been proposed for the clockwork rover that JPL wants to use for Venus exploration. The researchers also mention how RoBeetle could potentially serve as a model for microbots capable of aerial locomotion, which is something we’d very much like to see.
“An 88-milligram insect-scale autonomous crawling robot driven by a catalytic artificial muscle,” by Xiufeng Yang, Longlong Chang, and Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia from University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, was published in Science Robotics. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437416 Robotics firm expands autonomous data ...
Back in 2013, local Brooklyn papers were excitedly reporting on a new initiative aimed at getting residents involved in cleaning up the highly polluted Gowanus Canal. Brooklyn Atlantis, as the project was known, was the brainchild of NYU Tandon Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Maurizio Porfiri, who envisioned building and launching robotic boats to collect water-quality data and capture images of the infamous canal, which citizen scientists would then view and help classify. Those robotic boats ultimately led to the formation of the company Manifold Robotics, which aimed to further develop the unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with sensor technology. (The fledgling company received support from PowerBridgeNY, a collaborative initiative to bring university research to market.) More recently, the startup has now branched out to develop a mobile data collection platform that allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to operate safely in the sky near power lines. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#437395 Microsoft Had a Crazy Idea to Put ...
A little over two years ago, a shipping container-sized cylinder bearing Microsoft’s name and logo was lowered onto the ocean floor off the northern coast of Scotland. Inside were 864 servers, and their submersion was part of the second phase of the software giant’s Project Natick. Launched in 2015, the project’s purpose is to determine the feasibility of underwater data centers powered by offshore renewable energy.
A couple months ago, the deep-sea servers were brought back up to the surface so engineers could inspect them and evaluate how they’d performed while under water.
But wait—why were they there in the first place?
As bizarre as it seems to sink hundreds of servers into the ocean, there are actually several very good reasons to do so. According to the UN, about 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of an ocean. As internet connectivity expands to cover most of the globe in the next few years, millions more people will come online, and a lot more servers will be needed to manage the increased demand and data they’ll generate.
In densely-populated cities real estate is expensive and can be hard to find. But know where there’s lots of cheap, empty space? At the bottom of the ocean. This locale also carries the added benefit of being really cold (depending where we’re talking, that is; if you’re looking off the coast of, say, Mumbai or Abu Dhabi, the waters are warmer).
Servers generate a lot of heat, and datacenters use most of their electricity for cooling. Keeping not just the temperature but also the humidity level constant is important for optimal functioning of the servers; neither of these vary much 100 feet under water.
Finally, installing data centers on the ocean floor is, surprisingly, much faster than building them on land. Microsoft claims its server-holding cylinders will take less than 90 days to go from factory ship to operation, as compared to the average two years it takes to get a terrestrial data center up and running.
Microsoft’s Special Projects team operated the underwater data center for two years, and it took a full day to dredge it up and bring it to the surface. One of the first things researchers did was to insert test tubes into the container to take samples of the air inside; they’ll use it to try to determine how gases released from the equipment may have impacted the servers’ operating environment.
The container was filled with dry nitrogen upon deployment, which seems to have made for a much better environment than the oxygen that land-bound servers are normally surrounded by; the failure rate of the servers in the water was just one-eighth that of Microsoft’s typical rate for its servers on land. The team thinks the nitrogen atmosphere was helpful because it’s less corrosive than oxygen. The fact that no humans entered the container for the entirety of its operations helped, too (no moving around of components or having to turn on lights or adjust the temperature).
Ben Cutler, a project manager in Microsoft’s Special Projects research group who leads Project Natick, believes the results of this phase of the project are sufficient to show that underwater data centers are worth pursuing. “We are now at the point of trying to harness what we have done as opposed to feeling the need to go and prove out some more,” he said.
Cutler envisions putting underwater datacenters near offshore wind farms to power them sustainably. The data centers of the future will require less human involvement, instead being managed and run primarily by technologies like robotics and AI. In this kind of “lights-out” datacenter, the servers would be swapped out about once every five years, with any that fail before then being taken offline.
The final step in this phase of Project Natick is to recycle all the components used for the underwater data center, including the steel pressure vessel, heat exchangers, and the servers themselves—and restoring the sea bed where the cylinder rested back to its original condition.
If Cutler’s optimism is a portent of things to come, it may not be long before the ocean floor is dotted with sustainable datacenters to feed our ever-increasing reliance on our phones and the internet.
Image Credit: Microsoft Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#435648 Surprisingly Speedy Soft Robot Survives ...
Soft robots are getting more and more popular for some very good reasons. Their relative simplicity is one. Their relative low cost is another. And for their simplicity and low cost, they’re generally able to perform very impressively, leveraging the unique features inherent to their design and construction to move themselves and interact with their environment. The other significant reason why soft robots are so appealing is that they’re durable. Without the constraints of rigid parts, they can withstand the sort of abuse that would make any roboticist cringe.
In the current issue of Science Robotics, a group of researchers from Tsinghua University in China and University of California, Berkeley, present a new kind of soft robot that’s both higher performance and much more robust than just about anything we’ve seen before. The deceptively simple robot looks like a bent strip of paper, but it’s able to move at 20 body lengths per second and survive being stomped on by a human wearing tennis shoes. Take that, cockroaches.
This prototype robot measures just 3 centimeters by 1.5 cm. It takes a scanning electron microscope to actually see what the robot is made of—a thermoplastic layer is sandwiched by palladium-gold electrodes, bonded with adhesive silicone to a structural plastic at the bottom. When an AC voltage (as low as 8 volts but typically about 60 volts) is run through the electrodes, the thermoplastic extends and contracts, causing the robot’s back to flex and the little “foot” to shuffle. A complete step cycle takes just 50 milliseconds, yielding a 200 hertz gait. And technically, the robot “runs,” since it does have a brief aerial phase.
Image: Science Robotics
Photos from a high-speed camera show the robot’s gait (A to D) as it contracts and expands its body.
To put the robot’s top speed of 20 body lengths per second in perspective, have a look at this nifty chart, which shows where other animals relative running speeds of some animals and robots versus body mass:
Image: Science Robotics
This chart shows the relative running speeds of some mammals (purple area), arthropods (orange area), and soft robots (blue area) versus body mass. For both mammals and arthropods, relative speeds show a strong negative scaling law with respect to the body mass: speeds increase as body masses decrease. However, for soft robots, the relationship appears to be the opposite: speeds decrease as the body mass decrease. For the little soft robots created by the researchers from Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley (red stars), the scaling law is similar to that of living animals: Higher speed was attained as the body mass decreased.
If you were wondering, like we were, just what that number 39 is on that chart (top left corner), it’s a species of tiny mite that was discovered underneath a rock in California in 1916. The mite is just under 1 mm in size, but it can run at 0.8 kilometer per hour, which is 322 body lengths per second, making it by far (like, by a factor of two at least) the fastest land animal on Earth relative to size. If a human was to run that fast relative to our size, we’d be traveling at a little bit over 2,000 kilometers per hour. It’s not a coincidence that pretty much everything in the upper left of the chart is an insect—speed scales favorably with decreasing mass, since actuators have a proportionally larger effect.
Other notable robots on the chart with impressive speed to mass ratios are number 27, which is this magnetically driven quadruped robot from UMD, and number 86, UC Berkeley’s X2-VelociRoACH.
Anyway, back to this robot. Some other cool things about it:
You can step on it, squishing it flat with a load about 1 million times its own body weight, and it’ll keep on crawling, albeit only half as fast.
Even climbing a slope of 15 degrees, it can still manage to move at 1 body length per second.
It carries peanuts! With a payload of six times its own weight, it moves a sixth as fast, but still, it’s not like you need your peanuts delivered all that quickly anyway, do you?
Image: Science Robotics
The researchers also put together a prototype with two legs instead of one, which was able to demonstrate a potentially faster galloping gait by spending more time in the air. They suggest that robots like these could be used for “environmental exploration, structural inspection, information reconnaissance, and disaster relief,” which are the sorts of things that you suggest that your robot could be used for when you really have no idea what it could be used for. But this work is certainly impressive, with speed and robustness that are largely unmatched by other soft robots. An untethered version seems possible due to the relatively low voltages required to drive the robot, and if they can put some peanut-sized sensors on there as well, practical applications might actually be forthcoming sometime soon.
“Insect-scale Fast Moving and Ultrarobust Soft Robot,” by Yichuan Wu, Justin K. Yim, Jiaming Liang, Zhichun Shao, Mingjing Qi, Junwen Zhong, Zihao Luo, Xiaojun Yan, Min Zhang, Xiaohao Wang, Ronald S. Fearing, Robert J. Full, and Liwei Lin from Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley, is published in Science Robotics. Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots