Sarah Bergbreiter: Why I make robots the size of a grain of rice

289,367 views ・ 2015-01-21

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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My students and I work on very tiny robots.
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Now, you can think of these as robotic versions
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of something that you're all very familiar with: an ant.
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We all know that ants and other insects at this size scale
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can do some pretty incredible things.
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We've all seen a group of ants, or some version of that,
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carting off your potato chip at a picnic, for example.
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But what are the real challenges of engineering these ants?
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Well, first of all, how do we get the capabilities of an ant
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in a robot at the same size scale?
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Well, first we need to figure out how to make them move
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when they're so small.
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We need mechanisms like legs and efficient motors
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in order to support that locomotion,
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and we need the sensors, power and control
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in order to pull everything together in a semi-intelligent ant robot.
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And finally, to make these things really functional,
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we want a lot of them working together in order to do bigger things.
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So I'll start with mobility.
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Insects move around amazingly well.
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This video is from UC Berkeley.
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It shows a cockroach moving over incredibly rough terrain
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without tipping over,
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and it's able to do this because its legs are a combination of rigid materials,
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which is what we traditionally use to make robots,
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and soft materials.
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Jumping is another really interesting way to get around when you're very small.
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So these insects store energy in a spring and release that really quickly
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to get the high power they need to jump out of water, for example.
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So one of the big contributions from my lab
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has been to combine rigid and soft materials
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in very, very small mechanisms.
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So this jumping mechanism is about four millimeters on a side,
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so really tiny.
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The hard material here is silicon, and the soft material is silicone rubber.
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And the basic idea is that we're going to compress this,
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store energy in the springs, and then release it to jump.
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So there's no motors on board this right now, no power.
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This is actuated with a method that we call in my lab
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"graduate student with tweezers." (Laughter)
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So what you'll see in the next video
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is this guy doing amazingly well for its jumps.
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So this is Aaron, the graduate student in question, with the tweezers,
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and what you see is this four-millimeter-sized mechanism
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jumping almost 40 centimeters high.
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That's almost 100 times its own length.
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And it survives, bounces on the table,
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it's incredibly robust, and of course survives quite well until we lose it
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because it's very tiny.
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Ultimately, though, we want to add motors to this too,
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and we have students in the lab working on millimeter-sized motors
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to eventually integrate onto small, autonomous robots.
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But in order to look at mobility and locomotion at this size scale to start,
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we're cheating and using magnets.
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So this shows what would eventually be part of a micro-robot leg,
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and you can see the silicone rubber joints
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and there's an embedded magnet that's being moved around
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by an external magnetic field.
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So this leads to the robot that I showed you earlier.
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The really interesting thing that this robot can help us figure out
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is how insects move at this scale.
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We have a really good model for how everything
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from a cockroach up to an elephant moves.
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We all move in this kind of bouncy way when we run.
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But when I'm really small, the forces between my feet and the ground
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are going to affect my locomotion a lot more than my mass,
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which is what causes that bouncy motion.
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So this guy doesn't work quite yet,
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but we do have slightly larger versions that do run around.
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So this is about a centimeter cubed, a centimeter on a side, so very tiny,
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and we've gotten this to run about 10 body lengths per second,
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so 10 centimeters per second.
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It's pretty quick for a little, small guy,
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and that's really only limited by our test setup.
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But this gives you some idea of how it works right now.
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We can also make 3D-printed versions of this that can climb over obstacles,
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a lot like the cockroach that you saw earlier.
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But ultimately we want to add everything onboard the robot.
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We want sensing, power, control, actuation all together,
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and not everything needs to be bio-inspired.
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So this robot's about the size of a Tic Tac.
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And in this case, instead of magnets or muscles to move this around,
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we use rockets.
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So this is a micro-fabricated energetic material,
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and we can create tiny pixels of this,
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and we can put one of these pixels on the belly of this robot,
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and this robot, then, is going to jump when it senses an increase in light.
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So the next video is one of my favorites.
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So you have this 300-milligram robot
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jumping about eight centimeters in the air.
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It's only four by four by seven millimeters in size.
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And you'll see a big flash at the beginning
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when the energetic is set off,
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and the robot tumbling through the air.
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So there was that big flash,
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and you can see the robot jumping up through the air.
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So there's no tethers on this, no wires connecting to this.
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Everything is onboard, and it jumped in response
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to the student just flicking on a desk lamp next to it.
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So I think you can imagine all the cool things that we could do
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with robots that can run and crawl and jump and roll at this size scale.
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Imagine the rubble that you get after a natural disaster like an earthquake.
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Imagine these small robots running through that rubble
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to look for survivors.
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Or imagine a lot of small robots running around a bridge
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in order to inspect it and make sure it's safe
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so you don't get collapses like this,
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which happened outside of Minneapolis in 2007.
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Or just imagine what you could do
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if you had robots that could swim through your blood.
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Right? "Fantastic Voyage," Isaac Asimov.
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Or they could operate without having to cut you open in the first place.
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Or we could radically change the way we build things
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if we have our tiny robots work the same way that termites do,
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and they build these incredible eight-meter-high mounds,
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effectively well ventilated apartment buildings for other termites
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in Africa and Australia.
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So I think I've given you some of the possibilities
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of what we can do with these small robots.
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And we've made some advances so far, but there's still a long way to go,
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and hopefully some of you can contribute to that destination.
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Thanks very much.
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(Applause)
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