Soft is not usually a word you would associate with robots, but Dr. Fumiya Iida wants to change that. His work helps robots embrace their gentler sides in order to tackle tasks that usually require a human touch—like picking lettuce.
Ahead of a speech at the IEEE SofTech event this week, we spoke to Dr. Iida, Director of the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the UK, about how he and his team are building soft-rigid hybrid robots of the future.
Can you give us an overview of the current research projects you, and your PhD students/postdocs, are engaged in?
[FI] In the age of machine learning, the most exciting challenges are robots interacting with uncertain and less-structured tasks and environments. Many of my students are working on the problems of robotic manipulation, not in the factory setting, but in a more human-oriented environment, where objects are diverse, deformable, and delicate.
And one of your robots has delicate enough sensibilities to pick lettuces on farms?
[FI] My team and I did not know much about agriculture problems until 2015, but working in Cambridge, one of the major growers' regions in the UK, we realized that there were many scientifically interesting yet high-impact challenges around us. G's Growers was one of these industrial partners who helped us work on these problems. We developed lettuce-recognition technologies as well as harvesting systems to demonstrate a robot could solve harvesting problems. The technologies are currently being further developed for commercialization.
In a 2012 paper, you and your co-authors argue that 'Future generations of robots will be bio-inspired, have soft bodies composed of soft materials, soft actuators and sensors, and will be capable of soft movements and soft and safe interaction with humans.' Forgive us for bringing in a fictional, Disney reference, but are we in Big Hero 6 territory here? Is a Baymax what you’re aiming for?
[FI] Not sure Baymax is exactly what we are aiming for, but there are considerable challenges to making our robots softer. Softness is essential for robots working in uncertain/unstructured tasks and environments, but we have very little knowledge and technologies about it. Looking at our own human body, a substantial part (skin, hairs, organs, etc.) is soft, because softness is useful for many things. We need some sort of soft-rigid hybrid structures in our future robots.
In that same paper, you talk about neuromorphic engineering. Can you tell us what you mean by this?
[FI] Our brain, which is the "information center" in our body, is made out of soft substances, with the capacities of physical growth and plasticity, very much different from the embodiment of today's computers. It is important to understand how computation can come about in such soft systems in the future, beyond what rigid computers can do.
Part of soft robotics requires 'digital skin' as these new robots will not possess hard shells. How do you make robot skin, and deploy electrically conductive soft materials for such soft robotics units with sensors, circuits and photo-sensitive or chemically responsive functionality?
[FI] We still don't have a technological solution to make skin-like properties, especially if it comes to sensing capabilities and information processing. Interestingly most of our electronics technologies are hard kinds, and very difficult to integrate many electronics and sensors in soft bodies. There are many research projects around the world in the area of soft electronics and sensors, including our own, which will make our robots step closer to what we have in our skins.
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Baymax, in Big Hero 6, was able to change its physical dimensions in order to accomplish robot healthcare tasks. Talk us through how you build autonomous morphing into soft robotics using a modular construction and tendon-driven techniques.
[FI] Physical shape changing is very important in biological systems, and our robots should do the same. Soft robotics is certainly in the direction of how robots can change their own shapes, sizes, and other material properties (rigidity, softness, etc.). There are many different ways to technically achieve such functionalities, including inflatable structures, 3D-printable structures, tendon-driven actuation, and modular robotics.
Projecting a decade into the future, which soft robotics do you hope to have in your own live/workspace, and what sort of tasks will they undertake for you?
[FI] I would like to have a little "seed robot" that can grow into some insect-like tiny robots or large trees.
Dr. Iida will speak at his Sensor morphology work at IEEE SoftTech on June 15.
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