an international group of scientists presented a soft robotic arm, which adjusts its heat through sweating.
According to engineers, this ability will increase your stamina soft robots: they can work for a long time without overheating, even in extreme conditions.
Explain what soft robots are made of synthetic materials retain heat much better than their colleagues from metal. If this is a high probability that due to overheating the device will fail. The cooling system is, of course, can solve this problem, but then the robot will become more difficult and also adds weight.
So researchers drew attention to the natural cooling system, which is endowed with most mammals, and tried to reproduce it when creating soft robokitty.
polymeric materials with additives of nanoparticles, the team printed robotic fingers. To do this, researchers resorted to multi-component stereolithography. The essence of the technology is that hydrogel materials harden into a given form by the action of light.
the Base material is poly-N-izopropilakrilamid, and on top of it caused a porous layer of polyacrylamide.
First to react on temperature above 30 degrees Celsius by shrinkage: it squeezes water into the top layer with micrometer pores.
the Latter is sensitive to the same temperature range and automatically expand to highlight the “pot”. When the temperature drops below 30 degrees, the pores are closed.
Tests have shown that evaporation decreases the surface temperature roboplow at 21 degrees Celsius for 30 seconds. Thus, the cooling process is approximately three times more efficiently than humans.
In the next phase, the team joined the fingers in the manipulator, the ability to capture and lift objects. The tests showed that thanks to the sweatOtdelenia cooled roboparty not only themselves, but also the object with which they interact.
However, there are some nuances. First, because of the sweat ramoroka becomes slippery. Therefore, experts are exploring the different textures that will help to improve the adhesion to the object.
secondly, constantly sweating robots need to refill water. It seems that in the future engineers will present soft machines that will not only sweat, like mammals, but also to go to “drink.”
read More about sweating the robots discussed in the article presented in the journal Science Robotics.
by the Way, before “News.Science” wrote about the bio-robots with real nervous and muscle tissue and rubber on the computer to control soft robots.
Text: To.Science
