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Now, I have to say something about the
speaker or speaker is Matthew Bogarde,
and he's the founder of
a company called Supervisor.
And what they do, they're building
spacesuit components, robotic spacesuit
components for NASA, and
they're researching and developing
on a field called soft robotics.
So Masrour will not talk about
soft robotics.
So I'm not sure.
But I might give you this hint.
If you're close to
him, don't try hugging everything
because this robot might crush it with
its soft, delicate hands.
A warm applause for Matthew.
Hello.
I've I've got to clarify, I'm
a subcontractor on a NASA project.
NASA doesn't like it when you say I'm
working for NASA unless you, like, are
in their offices.
I just got to clarify that because people
who like inlays laser you from space,
like so
so Einstein was on a train and he turns
to the passenger next to him and says,
does Boston stop at this train?
So.
Why can't programmers tell the difference
between Halloween and Christmas,
because three one equals two five deck,
OK?
All right.
So I'm I'm the founder and
lead scientist at that supervisor.
Supervisor is a soft robotics development
company. Essentially, we we solve
hard problems with software robots.
Soft robotics is a new
field of robotics, is pretty young, only
about 30 years old.
And the heart of it is
most problems that get solved with
biology.
Most problems that get solved in nature
are done with compliant material, squishy
stuff.
And most problems that are solved in
engineering are done with hard
things. So hard language is hard,
actuators things that don't have much
good things that don't have much
compliance.
And it's essentially means that half of
all potential solutions to problems in
robotics have never even been considered.
And so that's what I'm excited about, and
I'm excited especially about applying it
to human scale problems.
So I'm going to be talking about some
of what our work is, the
uses for soft robotics and how to build
your own.
OK, we're going to start with
a little brainteaser, so
your skull is wired this way, you have a
hinge in your jaw, you have this
mandibular hinge and the muscles
are connected from your temples down to
your jaw. If you feel the sides of your
head, you clench your teeth.
You can actually feel those mandibular
muscles flexing.
And so you can actually generate 200
pounds. The average person can generate
200 pounds of bite force from their
jaw. That means if you stick your tongue
out right now, you can bite it clean off,
which is cool.
You really can. Don't try.
So how would you do this?
How would you bite things without
a skull?
So there are actually creatures
out there that do this squids.
So squids have a beak that's very hard.
It's a bird like beak.
It's actually it's really unusually
bird like. It's an example of convergent
evolution.
And they don't have a skull.
They actually don't have any hard
understructure whatsoever.
And they can bite things that are
actually many orders of magnitude harder
than they are in half.
They have a body that is about as firm as
a tomato, and yet they're able to bite
through fish.
And the way that they do this is through
something called functional grading,
so up the up the tip of the big
what's called the rostrum, and they have
a very hard end, that
very hard protein's hydrophobic proteins
that don't have much water in them that
blend out towards the wing end of the
beak, that blend out to softer and
softer, more water bearing proteins
as the thing goes down into the squid's
head. And that's meant by firm muscle
tissue that comes onto the wings and then
it distributes the force up through the
mantle.
So what ends up happening is you
have this very hard tip here
without a fulcrum.
It's actually balancing all of those
forces of biting across the structure,
using distance to balance
that force and to get lots of clamping
pressure on the end of that beak.
So what am I talking when I'm talking
about applying this stuff to human scale
problems? So I trust you can read.
I'm not going to individually talk about
these points, but just to say the
cost of having cerebral palsy is very
high. And a lot of that is because
physical therapy with one
on one with the therapist is very
expensive. And the orthotics, the things
that you use every day to try and get
you more mobility have to be customized,
tailored to every individual person.
Now, that ends up being very expensive
because specialists have to do
this work, so.
The reason why it's sort of a complex
problem that's not easily solved with a
traditional exoskeleton is human beings
don't really have a hard,
like, rigid ball bearing joint
in, say, the elbow.
We're not made of these hard linkages.
They're softer. These are actually two
surfaces that are not quite
cylindrical riding over one another.
It's not just a fulcrum
and everybody is different.
Every person's a little bit know.
They've got a little bit of different
muscle tone. They've got a little bit of,
you know, different something are
different diameters.
And so it's hard to make a one size fits
all robot in a traditional robotic sense.
But what's also the case is that
customizing it for a person takes a
particular expert, someone who knows
that particular robot very well to center
its power, say if you're trying to have
an elbow actuator where there's a pancake
motor right here and it's actuating your
arm out, it actually takes somebody to
get that right. They're as close as
they can to the pivot of your elbow
so that if it can't
come a little bit off of the joint,
otherwise it stands the potential of
hurting you. It can actually do more
damage than it's trying to fix.
So that's one thing that we've been
working on at Super Replacer is
soft exoskeletons for therapeutics.
So can I get a volunteer?
You. Yes, please come up.
What's your name?
Robin Roundabout's Robin.
Please.
Yes,
so.
Would you mind trying a
unlicensed medical device
groovy this
and.
Arm, could you please put your arm
through here?
Thank you so much.
All right, so the problem we're trying to
solve and cerebral palsy is the
point of your elbow on the point there.
Yeah, let's move it
up a little bit. How's that feel?
Groovy.
So I
wasn't able to take my my compressed
air supplies through the airport for
obvious reasons, but I'll make do
with a hand pump. So the problem we're
trying to solve in cerebral palsy is that
you have essentially high muscle tone,
that you're stuck like this.
And what we're trying to do is give even
more pressure to get your arm back out.
So just tell me what you feel as you go
through that.
So what's happening here is that
we have these soft actuators that are
distributing force over the arm.
You feeling the force?
Yeah, yeah.
Hey,
please give her a round of applause.
Thank you.
So the concept is
one size fits all pneumatic
exercycle skeletons, and what I think is
cool is that this compliant,
squishy squid like way of thinking
about mechanics means that you can do
things in these one size fits all ways.
But what you can also do is sort of
compensate for the irregularities of
individual human bodies.
So other
researchers are actually applying this to
really interesting problems in like
stroke rehabilitation, giving people
higher muscle tone, able to like
grip with more force
recovering from strokes.
There's a place called Other Lab in San
Francisco that's literally making a
squishy Iron Man suit.
And what I think is really cool about it
is that if you can encourage
people to do daily tasks, if someone has
a physical disability like cerebral
palsy, in giving them a little bit of
extra freedom can mean huge
lifetime gains, because
being able to grip crutches, being able
to dress yourself, enables you to do
a whole bunch of things that also
motivate you to continue using your
muscles to continue refining skills.
And so little changes to mobility
can have a huge change in overall
health.
So other ways people
are applying functional grading to
problems are with like exploding
software robots that has a soft structure
and a rigid structure.
So you can get things that are soft and
rigid to do particular to
solve particular problems.
And one way this is really applicable is
in prosthetics.
So this is a scan of Hugh Hefner, Hugh
Hugh Harry's legs. So Hugh Harry's a
double below the knee amputee who
works at MIT and he's been working on
these projects where he takes scans
and he 3-D prints functionally
graded structures that
distribute the force of the impact
from the prosthetic onto the residual
limb.
Now, the reason why you want to do this
is people are made of mostly water.
People are made of mostly water, and any
impact does not get dissipated by some
cushioning force.
There's not a cushioning spring inside of
the body. So when you have a residual
limb, you have an amputation, you have a
residual limb, your doctor tries to do
the best they can to make it susceptible
to a prosthetic, but it doesn't mean it's
infinitely powerful.
And so what happens is when you feel
a shock, say, of walking upstairs
from the prosthetic socket into the
residual limb, none of that force is
dissipated by the socket to get it
registered onto you.
It also means that waves of force
coming up through the prosthetic
sort of find all the tender vittles.
It's not a pleasant experience.
And what's difficult is that can cause
the residual limb over time to break
down.
So scar tissue isn't terribly strong.
And so it has this feedback
loop, a socket
for the residual and the interface
between the prosthetic and you
has to be particularly shaped to you.
But if it damages you, you change shape.
And so what they're trying to do is
create a system where it dissipates
force. The socket itself is
strong enough to support the force from
the prosthetic without
pushing all of that force onto the easily
damaged area of the residual limb.
And so Hugh is using functionally
graded structures to do this, 3D prints
that have very high levels.
The white is very high levels of
stiffness and the black are very low
levels of stiffness. So we can choose
where the force is distributed.
So another organism,
another mechanical system that does this
kind of distributed force to solve
problems very well are Gote Feet.
So goats don't spend a lot of time
looking at their feet, they're actually
able to put their feet wherever they
want, say it's sliding rocks, they put
their feet where they want and they don't
stare at them to figure out what they're
doing. If you've ever seen Asima walk
upstairs, it spends a lot of time looking
down, being like, OK, feet, what are you
doing?
And it's hard to position
the foot to land precisely on
the step with the right angle or else
it'll slide right off.
And that's because the system doesn't
have compliance in it.
Working with actuators and servo's, it's
often difficult to have them embody
compliance to be squishy.
And so it's hard to get them to
deal with unknown situations.
And oftentimes you have to pause a robot
in its tracks so it can look and
assess its situation before moving on.
So here are Goetze.
Also, Goetze.
And here's a robot.
So what I'm what I'm trying to solve
here is you notice its feet
are hard metal pads.
That's insane because it
can't possibly compensate for unknown
situations.
If it's moving forward, it has to land
with its foot at the correct angle.
If you remember, physics vector forces,
yada, yada, yada, it has to land with its
foot at the correct angle to compensate
for the force of the forward motion
on whatever it's landing against.
It's a very difficult problem to solve
purely computationally with hard
actuators, but it becomes simpler.
You can do it in a stupid or way
if you just arrange the matter
to move in a certain way when there's
force and
another organism that that solves
this very well as bugs.
So.
Flies have these things called sit
on their feet, they're speculated, here's
what the fly will do, is it'll drag its
foot down a surface and it could even be
a really smooth surface like glass, and
it'll drag its foot. And the itty bitty
hairs, those are incredibly tiny.
That's a tiny fraction of the size of a
human hair, will actually find little
cracks in microstructures inside of the
surface. And it just drags its foot down
until the foot catches.
And it just has this algorithm that is
like drag down foot again
until it catches and then start that
process again with N plus plus one.
And it just does that for all feet.
And then it does that again.
Flies aren't known for being very smart.
And so the way we're trying to employ
this in soft robotics, this represents
some of the work I actually got to
participate in with a NASA researcher
called named Erin Parnas.
He's not called Erin Parnas.
He's named Erin Parnas,
where we're trying to do this thing where
we can mass manufacture these guys
that have a complex behavior.
That's when you put them all together.
So the individual actuator is
really easy to make or the individual
mechanism isn't easy to make.
It's easy to multiply them.
And so you can get interesting behaviors
by multiplying that to have hundreds
and hundreds of these all working in
tandem. So the way this works is there's
a rigid structure here bringing up the
squid's again, there's a soft structure
here and then it has two mounting points
so that you can essentially load the
spring on it. And what happens is this
grip's in when force is
pushing down, but as soon as it's
unloaded, it'll pop back up.
And the way that these are used is
in big blocks.
What Erin is trying to do is he works at
JPL to try and make NASA exploratory
robots to climb over rocks and Mars
without having to ask NASA all the time,
what am I supposed to do with my feet?
Because it takes I think it's 14 minutes
to relay that signal to Earth and then
time to get that back.
And that makes exploring very, very time
consuming. But and this I
didn't flip this gif over.
This is literally upside down.
And so what's happening here is you take
all of these hooks and you have this
incredibly simple procedure, which is
take the poor, move it over, grip the
poor until the poor has caught
and then you're done.
So I'm going to show you how to make your
own soft robots.
So these are not sex toys.
There are soft robots.
So I do a lot of 3D printed
soft robots. I publish them in the open
source. I have a lot of stuff on
Thingiverse.
You can look me up giant.
I think I
am actually writing up a book
for make on like every soft
robot I can think of.
So it's all published in one place, you
know, yada yada by my book.
So it's not even out yet.
So it starts with you can actually use
3-D printing. I figured out how to water
tight print with an Afghan printer
so I can use cheap prints to
make things watertight so you can just
make molds. And what's cool about that is
I can take generations of molds that I'll
experiment with different ideas and make
them all at the same time and label them
like experiment ABCDE and then
cast them all, evaluate them against each
other and not waste too much of my time
because my time is precious.
I can buy robots to do the printing.
So it's
a mold that sort of like to have.
I'm not tall enough anyway.
So the mold is two halves
and there's a core in the middle and the
silicone is squishy enough that once it's
cast. And so this is a little gasket
here that you'll see coming into play in
the end when the mold is assembled in
the silicone is cast, I can actually pull
the car out of the silicone.
So there's a structure on the inside
of the silicone part.
There's a structure of a
void.
So I'm choosing where to put the not
silicone. And when that inflates, it
actually distorts the silicone in a
certain way.
And so will happen.
Here is here's the part that that gets
mounted on. Remember, there's there's
only silicone and air there and
then it makes this kind of complex
gripper.
And so I'm going to try to, again,
don't have my air supply here.
So forgive me, forgive
me for not being being macho enough to
really manage this, but.
All right, Griper, I do it.
Do it. Do it.
Yeah.
Anyway,
so it's it's able to pick up a big
variety of objects and by just
being simple and squishy because it's
squishes around the object and so that
compliant conformal nature makes it
good, it just sort of picking up stuff.
All right, Ed.
So the last thing I want to talk to you
about is our work at NASA
and another way
to do soft robots for
human scale problems.
So as as you might know, space
sucks for your body.
Space isn't very fun to be in.
It's exciting, but not terribly fun
physically.
So being in zero gravity like sphere is
your heart. Over time, the surface
tension of water becomes a dominant force
and so your eyes sphere eyes.
There's a particular kind of astigmatism
that happens in space because your eyes,
instead of being initially eyes are a
little bit egg shaped.
They'll actually turn into spheres and
you'll get nearsighted. Everybody in
space wears glasses.
And so one thing that's really difficult
is to make a spacesuit.
Essentially, what you're making is a
soft, human shaped spaceship.
And what's difficult about managing that
is the softness is there.
So you can do stuff with your many points
of articulation
in space to do things like repair the
Hubble and stuff.
But what's difficult is because there has
to be air pressure.
You evolved at the bottom of gravity.
Well, there there's a giant air column
above your head that reaches out into
space. That's all of this air pressing
down on you. And when you let all of that
off, everything in you essentially
swells up your your veins dilate
and it sucks a lot,
literally.
So.
Oh, no,
anyway.
What happens is your body doesn't work
well in a vacuum, and so what we've done
in usual spacesuit design is
to replace that atmospheric pressure
that you would otherwise have in a gravity
well, with pneumatic pressure.
We have a big airtight suit and we
inflate it to like seven pounds.
And that's that.
What's difficult is that becomes a giant
air spring. If you've ever, like, blown
up a rubber glove, you'll notice that
it's springy.
So the suit springs back and you're doing
delicate labor with your hands.
It actually is really terrible.
People's fingernails literally delaminate
from their nail beds and their gloves
fill up with blood as they're working
on the space shuttle as they used to
work on the space shuttle because
the glove design actually causes you to
essentially push against this spring
constantly.
Now, how would you how would you solve
that? Like you're currently the gloves
sort of like this.
So this is like, you know, imagine a
glove is in a vacuum chamber and you're
putting your hand inside of the glove in
the vacuum chamber. So in the current
glove, we fill it with air.
So we just extend the regular atmosphere
into the vacuum chamber.
If you put your bare hand into the vacuum
chamber, your hand would get all purple
and swollen.
And there are other ways to solve
this. Like you could have a perfectly
cast like steel hand
void so there could be a steel block with
a handshake hole in it. You grease your
hand up, put it in the steel, and when
the vacuum chamber vacuums, your
hand wouldn't change shape at all.
And so you wouldn't experience the
vacuum. But that's not very useful for
like repairing spaceships.
Another way to think about it is there's
pressure coming out.
So what if we put pressure coming in?
You can actually make really, really
small stretchy gloves and have somebody
put their hand inside of the really small
stretchy glove.
And then when you turn on the vacuum, the
pressure in will equal the pressure
out. And that's called mechanical
counterpressure.
And so that's what essentially we're
doing is here's the Gemini
style glove. So that's the big bag of
air. And here's the mechanical
counterpressure glove. The mechanical
counterpressure glove is made of
elastics.
They're actually by us to be a little bit
small and that provides the exact
same pressure in as space is pulling
out. Now, the way you get your hand
into these is we actually use some soft
robotic elements to change the size
of the gloves. So it's a little bigger
when you put it on and then you shrink
the glove with pneumatic pressure until
it's size to fit your hand.
And so the part that I'm specifically
working on spending most of my time on is
this is going to go into space.
Well, if everything works.
So the idea is not
to make a mechanical counter pressure
suit in one go, but do it incrementally.
And so we're putting it we're putting it
onto the current.
NASA is a suit using
an interface from the regular pressurized
suit out to the glove that's actually
open to vacuum so that the
glove protects you from the vacuum pole
of space. But it actually doesn't need a
bunch of air around your hand.
So what's interesting is we
have this pressurized suit in this deep
pressurized glove and to transition
between them, what my lab supervisor
spending the most of their time on is a
gasket that takes you from the suit,
pressure to the zero glove pressure
without cutting off any blood to your
arm. So it's a cool problem in
a cool interface and a cool problem
to solve. And we're doing this with fancy
3D printed molding with magnetic cores.
And it's what I really like about it is
the engineering is complicated, but the
materials are so cheap.
So anyway, I
am Matthew Pragati.
This is my company supervisor.
Please get in touch with me if you want
to solve problems, heart problems with
software robots.
And I'd love to take any questions you
have.
OK, thank you very much.
So I think we will follow the
usual Q&A pattern, and while you
are lining up behind the microphones, we
will start with the signal angel.
Hi. So I have two questions
from one person.
And the first one is, is there an
prostatic version of the Mars robot
flight crew like LOL, I'm
sorry.
The Mars, the claw explorer,
is there a hand version like a human hand
kind of hand prosthetic?
Oh, is there a prosthetic that works like
that? I've never seen one.
I mean, it's totally doable, though.
Oh, I did literally work on a project
to do this, I worked on a show called
Prototyp This that's how I met Aaron
Parnas is we literally made a Spiderman
suit that used these to
a person had one
on their hands. So I'm changing
my story.
So we made
hands that a person could climb a wall
with to give them Spider-Man powers.
So there it has existed
at one point in the universe.
And the other question from the person
was, our shock absorbers for prosthetic
legs available or is all
the compliance at the attachment to the
body?
So it's a it's kind of a complicated
problem, so
you might notice the recurve legs.
Have you ever seen the running legs like
the carbon fiber spring legs?
That's runners in the Paralympics will
use. They they have integrated
shock absorbers. It's a complete shock
absorber.
But the difficult thing is you can
imagine to absorb shock,
you need to move mechanically.
And so since the force is coming up, you
need to move down.
And so if you had just a spring so
you can imagine like a piston leg, you'd
have a spring and every tiny step
to absorb the shock, you'd end up
having a very odd gait, which might
be acceptable, might not be.
But it's it's a suboptimal gait.
And so the way it's currently
attempted is by having
silicone sleeves that get you between the
the prosthetic sleeve, which is usually
hard carbon fiber.
And the residual limb is a
silicone sleeve. But the problem is it
doesn't dampen any of the force.
And so the idea is to not absorb
shock by like having the prosthetic go
down, but distribute the shock to the
strongest possible places in the body
to distribute it to the strongest places
in the residual limb instead of
distributing it over the entire residual
limb.
And I hope for Potente like
jumping off buildings to
point another question or
the obvious thing, we have no
questions at the microphones.
I answered everything then another
second.
Yeah, if nobody else wants to.
Um, so another question
from the I.R.S.
is as like designing
Silicon Circuits, it's quite
complicated due to the variability
of process parameters.
How do you predict the elastic
behavior of your robots,
like, for example, by FEMA
simulation, or do you just do trial
and error?
Yeah.
So it it is sort
of amenable to finite element analysis,
but it is actually really processor
intensive. And you can do things that are
like works like models, so you can take
measures and you can distort the mesh
in a and it's a very nonlinear system
where some distortion changes the
wall thickness. So you can imagine an
inflatable thing.
The walls get thinner.
And so that changes the dynamic of the
system and you have to recalculate.
What ends up being difficult is having
that be accurate to the world is
tough.
And so you can have simulations that give
you some predictive power, but there
isn't anything where it's a good design
tool that also features simulation
where it's accurate enough to really
predict this is going to do that.
I did it. The the words
on the computer matched the world.
And so I I've designed
successfully what ends up happening is
you use some of those tools.
And then I found it's best to have
frameworks where you can iterate where
it's simple to modify because
the the simulation will never be
as informative as experimentation.
There are technical documentations.
The amount of stretching is in the silicone
and you can predict this to a degree.
But I found the best way is to
iteratively prototype and lower
the cost of making a new prototype by
making it really quick and really cheap.
And that ups the amount of prototyping
you can do.
Thanks. And as a follow up, like, how
much does the material properties vary,
like the variation of really high
or so silicone
is very consistent.
So I use RTV Silicones room
temperature balkanizing.
You can get them. There are two parts,
silicones. You mix them together and the
the chemistry on them has advanced to a
point at which you just 50/50
mix them and they cure and
their properties are very they're
very consistent.
Their variability
is documented, it's usually fairly low.
Some of it requires a little bit of
process control where if you're very
diligent about it, you need to make sure
that there are no bubbles in the casting
and that your casting is dimensionally
accurate. There are all these mold making
tricks and techniques.
They're sort of like Adam Savage model
making tricks and techniques of like
you've got to tip it to the side to make
sure the bubbles get out in this
direction and stuff.
But it's very consistent.
Groovy. OK, then we have actual
people with microphones and not that the
people on the Internet aren't actual
people,
they're not right. But but these
people are around here.
And since we have a lot
of time you have left, we
can have more questions.
We can have more questions from the
Internet. But first, um.
Oh, a few questions around
the microphones.
Yes.
So what I need to turn this on, that's
test, OK, whatever you mentioned before,
and the resources are really cheap,
where do you get your resources?
I don't know. In comparison to what?
I don't have any
funds, funds to research
with. Where do I get my materials?
How do you deal with
getting a specific shower?
And do you work with I don't know
what your material specifications
are and have you mix different
components together?
Well, how would you advise we have
this at home?
OK, so break down
where I get my materials.
How much do they cost?
Do I combine silicones and sort of what.
Sure. What like range of dromedaries
I am looking at.
Sure.
So do you have.
I'm sorry. I have done a lot of research
and I haven't found any answers.
So I'm asking you guys
conduct of silicon's.
Have you found any do any solutions
move so conductive
silicones are there.
If you look at dielectric elastomers
and it's spelled DYI like dielectric
elastomers, dielectric
elastomers, there is some documentation
on them. They tend to only be
conductive in very high voltage ranges
like plus minus five hundred and up
but.
They do exist, I tend to discount
them because it's sort of not my it's
not my field, there are some people who
are working in software robotics who use
shape changing elastomers for that,
use an electric sharp change, affect
the materials I'm using.
I have an FDM printer.
I use an automaker, too.
I use whatever cheap play
I can find on eBay.
I use Smart a lot.
The silicone that I use is smoothen.
I will use smoothen dragon skin tan
and Eco Flex Double 050.
They are about a hundred dollars a
gallon, but it is much
they are much cheaper than the technical
silicones you'll find for medical
research and medical implants,
those end up being one hundred dollars a
pint.
The the adhesives
I use, there's a
adhesive seal poxy that's Moulinex.
You can also use epoxy
silicone corks that you find from Home
Depot and stuff like that.
The shores that I'm using ranged from 50
to shore, a 40.
I'm usually around the shore, a 10
region. You can thin silicones out with
silicone oil and you can also by thinning
agents from silicone manufacturers
and eco Fleck's is
miscible with dragon skin because
they're both platinum kiore, silicones
that use the same filling agent.
And so I mix them oftentimes
at a 50/50 ratio to titrate the
transmitter.
Yeah.
Smooth skin doesn't have any
European distributors, do you have any
solutions?
Oh.
Amazon import
tours for physical objects,
I don't have a solution for for
exporting, I,
I would call them up and ask nicely.
Thanks.
Thank you.
All right, so we saw you using
that hand pump to close that
yes. And claw
thing. Yeah.
So I'm just imagining that on a on a
human being, for example, how much air
pressure which you need to
actually make it responsive and
prosthetic and, um.
Like, how much air pressure would you
need for tasks like lifting a
jug of milk, like a gallon
of milk, for example, and would it be
feasible to install all
the hardware you would need to generate
the pressure on a human being on
Earth and supposed to space
the relevant questions?
So my devices
tend to articulate from about 10 to 20.
I use compressed carbon dioxide
canisters, which I have about the power
density of a lithium polymer battery.
So if you look at grams per
jewel, they have about the same power
density.
So I tend to use them, especially
because the talk is instantaneous.
They come if you've ever reinflated a
bike tire.
So it's those emergency by Tyria
inflators or if you're San Franciscans
and like doing whippets, it's those
things.
And I
I think the systems that I have
made to compress them into like human
scale, usable things,
you can't take compressed gases on
planes, whatever.
But I think that the the
power density is appropriate
for articulating objects in this
domain.
People have worked in them.
Other lab has worked in
that, getting lots
and lots of force out of things like if
you want to pick up a jug of milk with
just compliant mechanisms
like you're starring only silicone,
that's a more difficult problem because
you have to stiffen the silicone to the
point at which it can resist the weight
of the gallon of milk.
But a way to get around that problem is
to put spines inside of things.
So the way nature is done that is when
things need to have a lot of talk.
They'll actually put
spines in things and the spines
will help keep distortion like
linear distortion from being
a detriment from the total amount
of force that you have in the system.
And so snakes do that
snake, solve that problem with spines,
but you
sort of have to choose your battles.
It's not a perfect solution for all
problems. It's a good solution for
compliant interfaces.
But you have to sort of choose your
battles. And I look to nature to do this,
to figure out what mechanisms are
appropriate.
Thank you.
OK, I heard we have more questions
from the Internet, from nice people, from
the Internet so
they could buy from a fridge, you never
know.
So
we have one question here.
How do Universal Geman
grippers compare to articulate
drippers? This is quite special, I guess.
Yeah.
OK, so universal jamming griper is
essentially balloon filled with coffee
grounds. If you ever bought vacuum packed
coffee is like a hard brick until you
pierce it and then it turns all soft.
And that's because without any air to
have the individual grains, the granules
to move past each other, the thing
solidifies.
And so you can get conditional stiffening
by pulling out or putting in air.
And so universal jamming grippers are
rubber balls that have coffee
grounds inside of them.
And then when you suck the air out, they
stay in whatever shape they are in.
So if you squish it over an object,
then suck the air out, it'll pick
up that object because it's stuck around
it. And so it can even be a straight
sided object, like a dice ardai dice
that named for one of those things.
So even if it's a straight sided thing
being rubber, it
there isn't any draft on the individual
random number generator to actually
pick up or it can't drop
right out because of the friction on the
walls. So the advantages
of those is they can pick up a huge
variety of objects, even things that are
like really flat on tables.
The disadvantage is they get
pierced pretty easily and
that's a problem, sort of all pneumatic
compliant systems, but they get pierced
pretty easily and there are categories of
objects that they can't pick up.
So anything that has like a handle that
you have to get all the way around
because there are disadvantages for using
the jamming gripper, too. So if it's
really tall and you want to squish it
over a handle, you need enough space to
squish it over a handle.
It'll actually distort a lot because
the more space, more distortion.
And so as you pick it up, it'll actually
be like and let go
of heavier objects.
One of the advantages of like the Soft
Robotics Incorporated gripper is that
the the octopus tentacle
style grippers, the digital hand
grippers are good at, like, wrapping
around things like a couple of times
or wrapping around things with handles
and picking them up.
You know, they're they're disadvantages
is they're not very good at, like,
picking up a penny.
They're very they're very bad at that.
You have more questions for us.
Yes, I have a question, as we have still
quite some time.
I guess it will take a bit.
So how does one build small
lightweight sources of Nannup,
Frenette Medek or
hydraulic pressure?
Got it. Yes. Really small.
Yeah. So that's a problem.
I'm actually trying to work.
So, you know, there are ways of
getting small amount of pneumatic
pressure with Pazos.
So what you can do is you can have a
closed volume, a goodbye computer
anyway, so you can
use those that have
essentially have to check valves.
And the pazzo is pushing
into this airtight container and it'll
push a little pressure out of the check
valve, out of check valve one and
put a little pressure from check valve,
too. And they can articulate very fast
and it'll generate pneumatic pressure.
The disadvantage disadvantages.
It's usually not that much.
And you have essentially a spring system
in there where if the pressure, the back
pressure is more than the pneumatic
sorry, then the peso can overcome.
Then you get it peeks out at pressure.
And so that's a way of getting really,
really tiny pneumatic volume or pneumatic
stuff going on. It's essentially, if you
imagine taking a as a speaker and
then putting a couple of check valves in
a thing you can have like a printed
enclosure for it.
And that would be a really tiny way.
The other way is that it's usually done
is you have a diaphragm, diaphragm,
pumps.
The small, cheap ones that you can get
from China are these diaphragm
pumps that just use a a rubber diaphragm
and they push pistons
that are actually all on a pivot.
And so they'll go around and the
diaphragm will push in and out and
check valves will cause the pressure to
continuously go out.
And so that's the way that's done.
Hydraulics, small hydraulics are
not super my field.
I don't know that terribly well.
My solution for that has actually been to
use pneumatics, to displace
hydraulics, to sort of like you could
imagine, bubbling air up into a soda
bottle and then having a straw with the
hydraulic and going down.
That's how I handle hydraulics.
OK, I have just realized how long you've
been standing there, so the microphone,
please, and we didn't get any
one human chair or something.
Um, yeah, I heard that,
uh, if you let robots roam
the forest, then they break something
after, like, five minutes and, uh,
they will destroy themselves pretty soon.
So called soft robotics also
be a solution to this problem?
I think that it is so
the you know, to like
wrap it up like, um.
To wrap up that that question in
sort of a bow, Boston Dynamics makes this
really expensive robot called Big Dog,
and I'm not here to like Boston Dynamics
because like, who am I to talk?
I make I make this like
I'm not super sophisticated.
But one of the disadvantages is it's a
it's a.
Complicated robot with lots of things to
go wrong and one thing
that can be very difficult in having it
operate for an extended length of time is
that it has to make all of its guesses
exactly correctly to not like topple
over. And it's supposed
to, like, keep soldiers from dying
and going into dangerous situations
instead of a soldier.
But there are I
have had reports from people, anonymous
sources, that people have literally
died trying to rescue the robot because
it was on their heads if the million
dollar robot exploded.
And yeah.
So the solution I
think that's appropriate for it is
to choose your battles, where you put
actuation, where I think there can be a
lot of passive systems that actuate
that, like have a little bit of a bias.
Like your foot is an example of this,
where your foot is doing a lot of passive
compensating for like what the dynamics
of the like the walking downstairs or
walking across rubble.
Your foot is compensating for a lot of
that just by being soft, and you bias it
in small ways with the tendons and
muscles that are in it.
And so that's my belief, is
that you choose where you've got
springiness and compliance and
then you match that to where you've got
your power for like Lokomotiv and for,
you know, hauling stuff.
Is that sufficiently answered?
I feel pretty good.
Thank you.
OK.
Oh, we have another Internet virus
Signal Angel.
Because we can't
answer questions that are not asked to
the microphone because we need to have
them on tape, but we have
the signal Angel and she has
another one for us.
I have another follow up question
if. Yeah, we still have some time.
Um, so if you would need to trade
off of medics
versus patrol
hydraulics.
I'm not an expert in hydraulics.
Yes. So which would you use
or what was the use case
for each of those? Got it.
So hydraulics are
really good for things like mining.
So you have like a drill
that's being turned by a hydraulic system
and it has instantaneous torque and you
can get a whole lot of force and there
are relatively low line losses because
of friction.
That's a really good use case
for hydraulics when you need instant
torque and you don't want springiness,
you can design springiness into
hydraulics. But since water is
incompressible a a
piston that's being driven like a
hydraulic actuator is exactly where
you put it. So you actually have to like
to compress water, what is technically
compressible, but it's like on the order
of like point one percent.
But you actually have to sort of squeeze
the hydraulic cylinder and get any spring
out of it. You actually have to like it
ends up distorting the metal around it or
blowing the gaskets.
So that works,
interestingly, when you talk about
compliance systems, because you usually
don't need as much like
this isn't going anywhere when dealing
with compliance systems, but there are
situations in which you want really
instantaneous torque and things like that
for like, you know, being able to really
quickly change the pressure
inside of a system where you're like
someone has spastic motion in their arms,
you're trying to exactly deaden it by
returning pressure that exactly equals
the opposite of that waveform.
And so it's an interesting use case,
but it's difficult to implement.
I use pneumatics partially because I can
be like wasteful with
it, where I can have things that are
leaky. And it's just like I just have
a monitor on how much pressure is in the
system. And I don't have to worry about
how much I'm putting in as long as it
loops back to here's how much
system pressure. Here's the state of the
system. It doesn't matter where the dial
goes, as long as it stays at that state,
it's fine.
And so it's easy for me to have slightly
sloppier systems that I can
sort of fudge around with and create
quick prototypes on and don't have to
hunt down leaks.
And that's why I use pneumatics, is that
that is a nightmare in hydraulics, like
hunting down leaks and stuff.
And I don't want to be covered in
hydraulic fluid every day.
OK, and to
first, you in the back, I think, because
you have been raising your hand for so
long, then it is
OK.
You said your your company
is a Nasdaq subcontractor.
And I think you said that you
were using all those those
gloves that you made will be used on
ISIS, um, space suits.
If if everything works, if everything
works. So
obviously you believe in your product
and. Yes, solid, very believable to me.
But my question is, does NASA
expect this to be the future of space
suits or are they just
paying you to test their own
noodle about every great every great job?
What did you do?
I messed about did
it work? No, that's fine.
So they're they're investing
in this because they want to solve
problems in spacesuits and they think
mechanical counterpressure is one of the
ways to do it, compliant
materials like Playtex made the first
functioning spacesuit that ever went into
space. You know, not Northrop Grumman,
not Boeing, Playtex
International Latex, Inc.
And it was professional
bra seamstresses that designed
and built the Gemini spacesuit.
So the science,
like the down and grade nitty gritty
science on soft materials, has
always been difficult to evoke in
physical stuff. But like having a gist
of it, understanding the materials from
working with them and applying them to
practical problems has sort of been the
thrust of most spacesuit technology.
And so NASA's like, well,
you guys, you work with the soft stuff.
Can we do a new thing that hasn't been
done before with spacesuits?
And if it works, it could improve a lot
of things and solve a lot of problems.
But what's difficult in brand new systems
is you're looking at your ideals and then
you find out how it fails, like the
externalities of it.
And so we're exploring a lot
of interesting things to try and solve
these top level problems.
And the designs are evoking these sort of
mid-level problems and we're sort of
hacking towards idealizing all of it.
But the performance, we say on the
gloves, like the dexterity in vacuum
chamber tests and the amount of pressure
that you see, like the even pressure
across the hand without causing
fingernail delamination is really
promising right now.
And so it's encouraging NASA and and
encouraging us to keep pushing with it.
Hello. Hello.
Yeah, you on the microphone.
We try to build some soft
robotics in our maker space
in Milan and it's very difficult.
So I think that without
having a design model to
actually design the things.
Yeah. Before to
build it, it's very hard.
So what do you think about the design
process of soft robotics?
Yeah, uh,
unfortunately, there's no there's no way
I can give you like a data dump.
It's it's almost like if
if you had to still copy C programing
out of books, like if
if it was very hard to like if the
Internet didn't exist and you still had
to copy C off of books, you'd have
thousands and thousands of people being
like, why doesn't my program work?
I've read the entire book and it's like,
well, you had a trailing slash or
something like there isn't a good
guide to give you an intuitive knowledge
of it without playing with it a bunch,
because there's no real good wellspring
of people who are jumping in to answer
your questions like there's not a soft
robotics form. Well, there is on my
website, but I actually have if
you go to Super Alacer Dotcom Slash
Forum.
I actually do have a software box and I
will answer your questions, but.
The difficulty is there isn't a
level of knowledge up there to solve sort
of meta problems of like what's a good
way to think about this?
What are successful models of software
robots? And so like getting a base
understanding to know why this doesn't
work and know what a successful
software robot tends to be designed like.
And good design processes are thin
on the ground. And I think that makes it
a really huge ramp.
You have to really get up the ramp
of the learning curve really quick to be
able to produce results to keep going.
And I'm trying to solve that by
publishing open source robots, you
know, make working designs and be honest
about the design process and then
publish, you know, what works.
And here's what to look out for.
But before that's thicker on the ground
and before people are available to answer
questions from people getting into it,
there's almost no way you can do a data
dump to somebody, be like just just read
this book and then you will know exactly
what's wrong with it, because it like
many design problems, it takes
having a detailed knowledge of the system
in place.
OK, I think we have one or two more
questions from this e-mail again,
I received working well and
we are still a lot of time left.
So all your questions.
Yeah, people have been really fun.
And they also want to thank you for
the talk as it was really cool.
And, um, yeah, one sees
that you really have fun with this
research.
Um, so the one
thing people are still interested
in, can you expand
a bit on the one million dollar robot
being saved by the soldiers?
Um, because,
uh, that was really quick.
Uh, um, sort
of.
So.
I don't want to I don't want to talk too
far out of my depth because, you know,
I'm not in the military, I have friends,
but I don't want to just be like, here's
how it is, everybody.
So.
In some ways, and this applies to
all the equipment that used, if you're
like an electrician like
and you're servicing something, you're
responsible for it.
Even if someone
directly working with you might say,
well, that that exploded, but it
definitely wasn't your fault up the
chain.
It's your fault.
And so when you introduce expensive
equipment that people are nominally
responsible for, if it fails,
you have to ask you have to find
some way to justify for them why
they're allowed to let it go.
And so when some when there are some
systems that instar incredibly
complicated and incredibly expensive
equipment like a robot
that's supposed to do certain kinds of
field work if it
gets lost on your watch,
your nominally responsible and therefore
have to take some of the heat for it.
And so I think in certain
situations when robots aren't
100 percent reliable, it ends
up with people having to take
responsibility for like saving
the robot, which is antithetical
to their initial purpose.
And so my theory is, if
you can get robots less expensive,
if you can change the manufacturing
principles of robotics, which is sort of
one angle that I'm trying to go with with
soft robotics, is that it
lowers that expense
value. So raises that like disposable
robot, just it can blow up.
That's OK.
We can get another value.
It changes sort of that equation.
But they are not liable
for them or they have to pay
if it breaks.
I don't think soldiers are individually
reliable, responsible for.
I don't honestly, I'm the last
person you should ask about how the the
billing system works in the United States
military.
OK, thank you.
Or it's OK.
We have more questions.
You start popping up at the last seconds
of the, uh, question and answering
from the segment Angels every time.
I think you might have found out how not
to stand all the time.
The microphones again.
Yeah. Uh, I have a question about,
uh, going into production.
Do you have any example of a project
that reached, uh, mass production,
mass market production of Soft
Robotics Project?
So.
The best example is actually nerve,
so nerve uses a ton
of soft compliant mechanisms to generate
pneumatic pressure and to say choose
which dart gets shot in in guns.
They actually use a lot of soft compliant
systems where it's like, OK, so you
squeeze this and it conditionally will
inflate that and that will go out to this
particular rocket.
Uh, Nurcan.
And and compliance systems are
everywhere, like sales, our compliance
system, they conditionally StefÃ¡n based
off of conditions so based off
of the wind and their direction, they
will stiffen because the fibers have high
tensile strength and you can actually
choose the shape of the sail based
off of how you trim it.
And that changes.
That changes how much of a wing it is
and various other properties that allow
it to go faster or slower and to be able
to like, finely tuned, like
as you go over waves. That's one of the
points of having a
nerd talk, and it's one of the points
of having a a line on
the edge of a Viking sail.
So if you ever see illustrations of
Viking ships, there is a line going out
to the edge of a square sail.
And you might be asking yourself, why the
hell would you do that?
Why wouldn't you just let the square sail
be the square sail? And it's actually
because the way Viking ships are
designed, they are not self writing.
They are actually very tipi.
And so when you go over waves,
the boat flexes a little bit
and you need to change
the shape of the sail and what direction
it is taking the wind as it goes
over waves by changing how aerodynamic
the sail is.
Or else you flip over.
And the reason I know this is because
there was a book published from an
anthropologist who studied Viking craft,
made an exact copy of one and kept
flipping himself over because he forgot
to have somebody trimming the sail.
OK, one more
question on one more.
All right, we can do it.
I don't know. We have still five
minutes left. So if you have a few are if
there is, he has more questions.
First of all.
Hello. So you have soft actuators,
do you also have soft sensors?
Oh, soft sensors.
So that that's a thing that I'm
working on as a background project.
So there are lots of ways to use
microfluidics as sensors to
have like a thing filled with a hydraulic
fluid in a tiny little channel and a
piece of silicone and read the pressure
at the other end, you know, with a
little, you know, microlensing
device.
One of the difficult things about soft
sensors is it's difficult
to compensate for the flex
of the system when calculating
how much force is on it. Because you can
picture if you made a flat sensor array
and you wanted to detect how much
pressure a person say
you have a person with a amputation,
residual limb is inside of a socket.
You're trying to measure where the pressure
is. So you have a flat sheet of sensors
and you stuff that into the socket
and the person stands on it.
The sensor array
is actually going to be detecting a lot
of forces because of the particular order
in which it bent, not directly
because of the amount of pressure that
it's experiencing.
So one thing that is really difficult
in sensor design is coming
up with things that the
orientation like the the way
the sensor is accidentally stuck to the
side of the cup in
which you're trying to measure the force
or whatever that is, it's difficult to
compensate for that to make sure you're
getting something accurate.
And so one of the ways that people do
that is by embedding stretch sensors in
soft robots. And so they have like a
linear measurement of how much stretch
has been done with the molding
that I do.
This is sort of an example of it.
With the molding that I do, I can choose
where to put individual electronic
components inside of a soft thing.
And so this is a ring that
has a a trinket pro
inside of it and a couple of RGB LEDs.
And those are in a specific spot
in the silicone because they have a
little wider board that I just slots into
the silicone and locks and mechanically.
And so you can you can if you choose your
battles with where you put your sensors,
you can have them integrate wisoff
systems. But it ends up being
a confounding problem, but one
that a lot of people working in
prosthetics and in spacesuits are working
on and doing cool stuff in.
OK, so the question is signal
angel. All right.
We have more for us.
Yeah, sure.
People tend to get creative.
So the last question from the IOC is,
do you can you build pneumatic
computers like state machines
with the.
Yeah, with the stuff?
Or do you always have to use a computer
like interface?
Yeah, that's actually a question I'm
really interested in because
the idea of doing pneumatic state
machines of having like something biased
where you can have a series
actuator, where it's like this thing will
only inflate under these conditions.
And so you have like
this is the way octopus arms work.
Octopus is a really cool you end up
taking a lot of soft robotic stuff from
sea creatures.
So when octopuses are panicked and
trying to move all of their legs at once,
they actually don't have enough
processing to really do all legs
flowing at the same time.
And so if you see an octopus like pick up
and run, it will actually limit
the zone of solutions it's trying to find
by creating straight sections in its
legs.
And so it will actually create joints so
it can physically run.
And the way it's
it has a distributed neuronal
system, so octopus, individual limbs
actually have their own processing
centers and so you'll notice they have a
distributed brain.
And so one thing that's really cool is
that you can actually look at with
electrodes, you can look at what is
happening in an octopus's limb as it's
gripping something. And it's actually
that you'll have these relay centers
where it grip something with the end of
the limb and it will be controlled by
this functional relay center.
And there will be a signal sort of coming
down and coming back from
like the arm will have
a relay center like the brain in a
brontosaurus. But and there will be
like little nodes up
and will happen is the nearest node
will start the flex.
And if another node gets hit, like
as it's wrapping something up, if the
next node gets hit, it'll continue
wrapping. But if the next node doesn't
get hit, it's gripping a small thing and
it can discontinue the wrapping motion.
And so what it's doing is it's sort of
sending a signal back and forth and
asking, where do I need to stop
the wrapping, Kawika?
So.
To try and simplify the problem
space, and so I think
that would be really cool to do in soft
robotics, to have these passive systems
where you don't need a lot of signaling
going on, to just have Pasek pneumatic
like that.
There's pneumatic logic inside of it.
I think I've created a solution for that
that involves like this two part molding.
The difficult thing to do with
pneumatic logic in soft stuff
is you have to create check valves and
check valves are really hard to create
without a spring.
And when you cast something, you don't
cast it in a spring orientation.
It's hard to preload.
And so it's very difficult.
Like if you imagine a heart valve,
you know, the heart valve opens
up. It's a it's essentially a heart valve
that looks like Chaillot.
It's got like three actuating pieces
and they're actually all bigger than the
hole. And so they fall back towards
each other to create a checked valve
where pressure can come back on the
heart.
It's very difficult to do that in casting
because they open up like you cast them
in the opening orientation.
There's nothing that springs back to
cause them to close.
But I think that I have created a
solution for that with some complicated
two part molding to create things that
get biased by another part that gets
put in.
But that's sort of like interesting
theoretical soft robotics that currently
doesn't pay the bills.
So.
OK, again, thank you very much for your
interest, Tony.
We are all united.