Self healing soft robots
Project description
At VUB we are working on the breakthrough of fully-autonomous self-healing soft robotic devices, by integrating engineered functional materials, smart sensing and active actuation and control capabilities into soft robots. These soft robotic systems will be able to sense and evaluate loss of performance and heal damage due to fatigue, overloading, and injuries by sharp objects present in dynamic environments or by human contact. Such fully integrated self-healing robotic systems – and by extension other devices, machines and structures – are unprecedented in scientific literature.
The work lies in using the in-house. developed self healing conductive and non-conductive materials with new multi-material processing techniques as laser cutting/welding, additive manufacturing and moulding to developed integrated soft robots with embedded sensing capabilities.
The breakthrough targeted in this work is the development of complete robotic systems that are able to feel pain (sense microscopic and macroscopic damage), react intelligently to relieve the pain (evaluate performance and prevent catastrophic failure), take the necessary measures to heal the damage and to restore all functions (induce or facilitate a controlled autonomous or non-autonomous healing of damaged elements), perform a rehabilitation (evaluate the quality of the healing process and take measures accordingly), and, finally, return to action. The unique, integrated design of SH capabilities in robotic systems with intelligent control will lead to lighter, more efficient, more reliable and more sustainable designs, as preventive and corrective healing will drastically increase the performance lifetime and reliability of such systems, even under unpredictable conditions. On the long term, it will provide the fundamental insights and scientific developments to introduce performance evaluation and structural health monitoring, along with active control and intelligence to a much broader range of application domains.
About the research Group
Brussels Human Robotics Research Center
The Robotics & MultiBody Mechanics research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) started its activities in 1990. In 1995 they started the research on soft actuators in legged robots to absorb impact, interact with an unknown environment and energy efficiency. Currently, the group is well known for the design and control of variable stiffness actuators, implemented in robots with applications in physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) and cognitive HRI (cHRI). During last years, within the group were developed the compliant actuators Pleated Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PPAM 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0), different versions of the MACCEPA actuator and the SPEA actuator, funded by an ERC Starting Grant and initiated the research towards self-healing actuators. In the ERC we worked on the ambitious breakthrough to develop a material-oriented solution by implementing self-healing (SH) materials for actuators, for which was collaborated with material scientists (VUB-FYSC).
Appropriate control architectures for soft actuators are designed for improved safety, robustness and energy efficiency. The actuators are implemented on different legged robots like the monopod OLIE, the pneumatic biped Lucy, the MACCEPA powered Veronica and H2R biped and the hopping robot Chobino1D. The research towards legged robots and Variable Stiffness Actuators also lead to the development of prostheses (ankle-foot IPPAM, AMPFOOT 1.0-4.0, currently made a spinoff company Axiles Bionics and the knee-ankle HEKTA and Cyberlegs prostheses) and exoskeletons for the lower limbs like Altacro, CORBYS, Biomot and Mirad. The research is performed from fundamental studies, towards application driven research and valorization and is core lab in the Flemish Strategic Research Center “Flanders Make” for the manufacturing industry. R&MM is the leader in the BruBOTICS consortium combining all robotics related expertise of the VUB together from exact and applied sciences (AI, sensors), human physiology and rehabilitation and social/economic studies with more than 90 academic researchers.
Recently, there is a strong trend in both the research community and in the industry toward the development of collaborative robots, the so called cobots. R&MM researchers successfully accomplished a project in manufacturing robots, the ICON Claxon during which the first coworking robot was installed on the assembly line of Audi. In another project SBO-Yves, apart from workspace sharing, also collaborative assembly is investigated, combining the strengths of both the human and the robot while taking the ergonomic load of the human into account. Finally, R&MM group is involved in studies on ergonomics: Flanders Make ICONs Ergoeyehand (improving ergonomics by cobots), ICON Smarthandler (manipulation heavy objects) and the ICON Prorob (VR/AR based robot trajectory programming to improve ergonomics and productivity).Up to now R&MM group was involved in 14 EU projects and 1 ERC grant and counts 45 researchers, working in strong multidisciplinary teams.