Combining soft robotics and space technology

Paul Glick, a Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School, got a unique chance to do hands-on at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Glick, who works in the lab of mechanical engineering professor and roboticist Michael Tolley, got to design and carry out most of the experiments for an electrostatic gripper for flexible objects build by JPL and UC Berkeley engineers. The team presented their work at the IROS 2017 conference in late September in Vancouver.
Glick is part of the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship program. He works to bring soft robotics to space technology. Here is a more detailed description of his research. 
Tolley's group will present some of their research at the Oct. 27 Contextual Robotics Forum here on the UC San Diego campus. 
Watch a video of the gripper that Glick ran experiments on in action:

Soft robots developed by Jacobs School engineers featured on SciShow

So Hank Green, brother of "Fault in Our Stars" and "Paper Towns" author John Green, just featured one of the robots designed by Jacobs School roboticist Michael Tolley. 
He developed with colleagues at Harvard the first robot with a 3D-printed body that transitions from a rigid core to a soft exterior. The robot made its debut in Science on July 10.

"We believe that bringing together soft and rigid materials will help create a new generation of fast, agile robots that are more robust and adaptable than their predecessors and can safely work side by side with humans,” Tolley said at the time in our press release. 
The idea of blending soft and hard materials into the robot’s body came from nature, Tolley said. For example, certain species of mussels have a foot that starts out soft and then becomes rigid at the point where it makes contact with rocks. “In nature, complexity has a very low cost,” Tolley said. “Using new manufacturing techniques like 3D printing, we’re trying to translate this to robotics.”

And indeed, Green featured the robot as part of a segment on biomimetics.
Enjoy the whole show, or fast-forward to the four-minute mark, where Green starts talking about Tolley's robot. 

Tolley and his students will be presenting some of their robotics work here on campus on October 30 at the Contextual Robotics Forum.  (UC San Diego alumni can register for half price.)
 

Squishy robot that jumps is in the media spotlight

It's been compared to a frog, called "extremely cute" and "a bouncing bot." A robot designed by engineers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, became a media darling this week. The robot is the first of its kind with a 3D-printed body that transitions from hard at the core to soft on the outside. It also is capable of more than 30 untethered jumps.
Below are some of the videos it starred in this week: And many more...

These two Jacobs School-related robots were featured in Science special issue on robotics

We were excited to see both WowWee's MiP and Brain Corporation's eyeRover make an appearance in Science magazine's special robotics issue that came out Oct. 10.

MiP, which appears in this infographic, was designed by the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab, led by  Prof. Thomas Bewley, and by toymaker WowWee.  MiP, short for Mobile Inverted Pendulum, can balance itself and drive around on two wheels. You can interact with the robot using intuitive hand gestures. More on MiP here and here.
Meanwhile, eyeRover is partially the brain child of Jacobs School alum Marius Buibas (Ph.D. 2011). Buibas led the design of the robot's hardware--the electronics, mechanics and 3D-printed body. The difference between eyeRover and other robots is that it can be taught to do a task, rather than programmed.

According to Science:

EyeRover may look like a toy, but it's packed with some of the most advanced robotic technology ever devised, including a prototype computing platform designed to emulate the human brain. Unlike conventional computer chips and software, which execute a linear sequence of tasks, this new approach—called neuromorphic computing—carries out processing and memory tasks simultaneously, just as our brains do for complex tasks such as vision and hearing.

 There is a common thread between the two robots: Nick Morozovsky, a student in Bewley's research group, who just earned his Ph.D. from the Jacobs School. Morozovsky developed a tool combining hardware and software to evaluate various motors to balance MiP. He also worked part-time at Brain Corporation and was the architect behind an earlier version of eyeRover that inspired the robot featured in Science. Industry recruiters, take note: Morozovsky is currently looking for a full time job.

Bonus: the special issue's online version features a video of origami robots, which then postdoctoral student Michael Tolley helped develop. Tolley will join the Jacobs School faculty Nov. 1.

This soft rubber robot is propelled by controlled explosions

And Mike Tolley, soon to be a professor of mechanical engineering here at the Jacobs School, does it again. This time, he presented a soft robot that uses controlled explosions to jump at the IROS 2014 conference in Chicago this week.
The three-legged robot made of silicon rubber is propelled by a butane-oxygen reaction. Check out the video to see it in action. Cool slow-motion shots start a little bit before the one-minute mark.
Full IEEE Spectrum story here.

Robot survives flames, being run over by a car

Michael Tolley, the Havard postdoc who is set to join the Jacobs School faculty in November, strikes again. Last month, Tolley was part of a team that created origami robots capable of folding onto themselves and moving. This month, he is the lead author on a paper that describes a soft robot capable of withstanding flames and walking through snow. The robot bounces back even after being run over by a car. In the video above, the robot is equipped with a camera and walks about a lab to find a hidden laptop.

More coverage in IEEE Spectrum and the New Scientist.

Expert in origami robots, soft robotics and programable matter to join Jacobs School faculty

Michael Tolley, who will become an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Jacobs School Nov. 1, is one of the co-authors on a paper about self-folding robots published in Science today. Tolley worked on the project while a postdoctoral researcher at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

"I am very excited to pursue similar unconventional approaches to the design and fabrication of robotic systems at UCSD," Tolley said in an email.

According to the paper:

The robot starts as a flat sheet with embedded electronics, and transforms autonomously into a functional machine. To accomplish this, we developed shape-memory composites that fold themselves along embedded hinges. We used these composites to recreate fundamental folded patterns, derived from computational origami, that can be extrapolated to a wide range of geometries and mechanisms. This origami-inspired robot can fold itself in 4 minutes and walk away without human intervention, demonstrating the potential both for complex self-folding machines and autonomous, self-controlled assembly.

 On his website, Tolley describes his contribution as "development of origami-inspired design and fabrication approaches for the fabrication of function electromechanical machines."

The paper has received ample media attention, including:

The Wall Street Journal

The New York Times

NBC News

IEEE Spectrum 

and

NPR

In addition to origami robots, Tolley is interested in soft robotics. He has developed untethered soft robots with integrated power and control systems. Check out this video:


Tolley also has worked on programmable matter, a substance that can follow directions to change its physical properties. According to his website: 

Imagine a system that assembles a pile of regular, mass-produced components into an iPod, computer, robot, or tool with embedded sensing and computation. Objects can be assembled or repaired on-the-fly, and deconstructed to be recycled into new objects when they are no longer needed. This technology would open up new possibilities for rapid prototyping, space exploration, sustainable technology, and evolutionary design.

 Cool videos illustrating the process below: