Roboticists at the University of California San Diego have developed flexible feet that can help robots walk up to 40 percent faster on uneven terrain such as pebbles and wood chips. The work has applications for search-and-rescue missions as well as space exploration. It's the first time that such feet have been tested on uneven terrain, like gravel and wood chips.

The feet allow robots to walk faster and grip better because of a mechanism called granular jamming that allows granular media, in this case the coffee grounds, to go back and forth between behaving like a solid and behaving like a liquid. When the feet hit the ground, they firm up, conforming to the ground underneath and providing solid footing. They then unjam and loosen up when transitioning between steps. The support structures help the flexible feet remain stiff while jammed.

Researchers designed and built an on-board system that can generate negative pressure to control the jamming of the feet, as well as positive pressure to unjam the feet between each step. As a result, the feet can be actively jammed, with a vacuum pump removing air from between the coffee grounds and stiffening the foot. But the feet also can be passively jammed, when the weight of the robot pushes the air out from between the coffee grounds inside, causing them to stiffen.

[Source:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200602110135.htm]

Robots are becoming more widely used in various industrial fields such as electronics, logistics, chemical industry, involving multiple interdisciplinary subjects such as machinery, control, computers, and information. Journal of Frontiers of Mechatronical Engineering also publishes researches on robots in industrial applications.

Chengyun Wang et al. made a design on monitoring PTZ with high scalability. (what is PTZ?) It mainly discussed how to carry out auxiliary operations with the detection robot with telescopic function.

In this paper, they provided a design scheme of a lifting PTZ with high-scalability for detecting search and rescue robots based on the analysis and reference of various lifting mechanisms at home and abroad. It proposed a rigid-flexible dual-property automatic lifting mechanism transmission scheme which adopt s a roll-up spring as a supporting mechanism, a gear and a sprocket as a transmission mechanism, and a telescopic rod as an auxiliary supporting mechanism, which provides a new solution for the disadvantages of the traditional lifting mechanisms with large original volume and poor telescopic performance.

Through the actual test, the mechanism can raise to the target stroke of 2 meters in 60s smoothly and widen the field of view of the image capturing device effectively based on the detection and rescue robot, which improves the ability of passing the narrow space and rescuing obviously.

Read the full paper at: http://ojs.piscomed.com/index.php/FME/article/view/839