Researchers invent drip manipulator robot to clean dangerous liquids

According to a recent article in the magazine Document Horizons.

This breakthrough is the product of a collaboration between two different laboratories within CSU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. It has been made possible by combining two application technologies, soft robot and super hydrophobic coating.

The soft robot controller is made of inexpensive materials such as nylon thread and adhesive tape. It is powered by an electrically activated artificial muscle. This combination can be used to create inexpensive, lightweight grips capable of fine machining, but 100 times stronger than a human muscle with the same weight.

The result is something that runs counter to our cultural notions of what a person should be robot is, and what it can do.

Conventional robots are made of heavy, stiff and expensive parts. That makes them poorly suited for some tasks.

On the other hand, soft robots can be light and provide a gentle touch that is difficult for conventional robots to achieve. They are much lighter and can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of their rigid cousins.

Jiefeng Sun, a postdoctoral fellow in the Adaptive Robotics Laboratory of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, said: “A grip as large as my finger weighs a gram or two, including the attached artificial muscle. And it’s not expensive – just a dollar or two.” -First author in the newspaper.

The soft robotic grippers are treated with a new super absorbent coating that makes droplet manipulation possible. Super absorbent coating resists wetting of nearly all liquids, even in dynamic situations where contact surfaces are tilted or moved. When applied to the soft robotic controller, the coating allows it to interact with the water droplets without breaking them. surface tensionso that it can capture, transport and release individual droplets as if they were flexible solids.

The superhydrophobic coatings used in the droplet controller were developed at CSU by associate professor Arun Kota (now at North Carolina State University) and postdoctoral fellow Wei Wang (now assistant professor of education). professor at the University of Tennessee). Wang and Kota also contributed to the paper.

“It’s a very good synergy between these two types of research. Dr. Kota did a great job coatco-author Jianguo Zhao, associate professor of mechanical engineering at CSU and director of the Adaptive Robotics Lab.

During the early stages of the study, the team had trouble getting the journal editors’ attention. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an opportunity to show their invention potential.

“Because of the pandemic, handling dangerous infectious materials is a hot topic. So we added a blood manipulation test after the first revision,” Sun said. “That got us through the review process.”

The combination of inexpensive materials and innovative possibilities has interesting applications. In many liquid spill situations, human cleanup can be hazardous due to toxicity, contagion or other hazards in the surrounding environment. These drip controllers are cheap enough to be disposable, yet capable enough to do a lossless, precise liquid cleaning job like no other robot has ever done.

“This is a first, but it’s also a very unusual example of a high-tech product that’s not too expensive,” Zhao said.