Six MicroTug robots from Stanford’s Biomimetics & Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory are able to pull a 2-ton vehicle but not very quickly.
Moving a two-ton vehicle can be a tough job for the average human to pull or even push for that matter but it’s a breeze for a team of six tiny robots weighing in at only 3.5 ounces or just 1/5 of a pound. A team from Stanford’s Biomimetics & Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory designed the tiny MicroTug robots to work as a collective of sorts to move heavy objects, drawing inspiration from ant colonies, which work together to accomplish tasks such as moving large prey.
Like the biblical character Sampson, the secret to the robots great strength lies in its hair or more accurately, the rubber hairs on its bottom. These hairs act much like the adhesive properties found on gecko feet allowing it to maintain a stable grip on a smooth surface. The team designed the MicroTug’s bottom to function in much the same fashion- when the robot pulls an object the rubber hairs grip the surface and the harder the pull, the harder the grip. When the bot is done pulling the object, tension is released and the hairs go back to their normal state and the robot can then move freely. This is known as the van der Waals force, which can be attractive or repulsive depending on the state.
The robot’s overall design is pretty simple and consists of a battery pack, motor driver board, processor (brain), Hall Effect Encoder, a winch and spool, a pair of lift arms with driver motors and the controllable adhesive tile. Each of those tiny robots can pull over 2,000-times its own weight- about 200 Newtons when working together or roughly 45lbs working alone, which is enough to pull a two-ton vehicle, albeit very slowly. Still that’s a pretty impressive feat, imagine what could be done if the robots were scaled to larger sizes.
Just one little 100-gram robot is capable of pulling over 2,000-times its own body weight using a series of tiny rubber micro-hairs.
To move and turn, the MicroTug uses its front wheels that are attached to the lift arm, which can also actuate up and down depending on whether it’s moving or pulling. The team actually designed several variations of the tiny MicroTug with one using piezoelectric hairs that could cycle quickly between to adhesive states at a rate of 16-times per-second and another that functions on vertical surfaces, allowing it to pull heavy loads up walls. The team will present their MicroTug robots in May (16-21) at the (IEEE) International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Stockholm, Sweden.
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