Session at #32c3: Soft Robotics with Matthew from Super-releaser

Knowledge Collection DIY Life Sciences
, , , ,
1

Engineering meets biomatter. The squiggly squishy, compliant bits of biomechanics allow you to produce one size fits all. If someone has physical disability, like cerebral paulsy, giving them a little bit of improved mobility can have huge positive effects.

Functionally grated structures: Inspired by Bird beaks: Hydrophobic proteins and high water content parts of the body.

Example where functional grating is applied: Cerebral palsy

  • Cost of therapy is very expensive because one on one time with specialists are very costly, and tech used is not modifiable.

  • so they build soft exoskeletons for actuators (for joints) using functional grating principles. Check out their “Neucuff”

Another example where functional grating is used: Prosthetics

Uses distributed force: see goats’ feet as a reference/description of the principle used to build prosthetics.

  • Feets that are hard metal pads (hard actuators) does not allow you to compensate for unexpected events.

  • Also flies’ spatulated hairs on their feet. N++1. Aron Parnell tries to mass manufacture.

Last example: Replacing atmospheric preassure in space suits with pneumatic preassure, shrinking them to fit human body. Problem: Spring effect. Solution: Don’t make mechanical counterpressure suit in one go, but gradually? (not sure I got this right)

2

Soft robotics is very interesting overall

Be it inflated or just rubbery soft (silicone is a great material to play with at home!).

One particularly interesting aspect is that it uses a different engineering paradigm I dare say. Usually things are treated as broken if they deform (past an elongation of 0.2% typically). If you look at the majority of what matters on this planet - deformations (sometimes quite large) are the norm!

The reasons there is such a difference in approaches is to a large degree historical and does NOT make much sense for very many applications. In fact prothesis are a nice example of the old paradigm hit the wall pretty bad:

If you replace a bone (which is pretty soft compared to what we usually design for in the engineering world!) with a much “stiffer” (technical term) artificial limb and you now jump with such a replaced bone things don’t end well. While the artificial limb can (and does) take higher stresses - their neighboring bones typically do not - and eventually are wrecked.

Fly feet, cockroach feet, gecko feet are also utterly fascinating subjects if you delve into them!