Spherical Soft Robots Can Roll And Jump
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 7 of September , 2009 at 1:07 am
This may not look like the most promising design for a robot, but there’s a lot of potential to be had with robots that can change their shape. These robots, from Ritsumeikan University in Japan, are constructed with spherical shells of spring steel attached to an inner core (which contains the power source and electronics) via shape memory alloy wires. Applying voltage to the wires causes them to contract, deforming the shape of the robot. By doing this, the robot can change its center of gravity to roll in any direction, and by contracting the spring steel enough, the robot stores up enough energy to jump.
The big limitation at the moment is that shape memory alloys only really work in one direction: applying a voltage heats the wire, causing it to shrink, but in order for the wire to unshrink, it has to radiate that same amount of heat, which takes a little while… So the robot can deform to roll or jump, but after it does, it needs a cool-down period.
Even with this (surely surmountable) limitation, jumping robots have an advantage over both ground and flying robots: they can move around without respect to terrain without having to expend energy staying airborn. ‘Course, they’re not as efficient as a ground robot, or as versatile as a flying robot, but they’d be perfect for things like planetary exploration where reliability and versatile mobility are more important than speed.
More info is available in this paper (*.PDF).
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Category: Research
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