Kind: captions
Language: en
this is a robot that can grow to
hundreds of times
its size and it can't be stopped by
adhesives
or spikes although it looks kind of
simple and cheap
it has dozens of potential applications
including
one day maybe saving your life
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now i made a video before about a soft
truss robot
and this is also a soft robot but very
different in how it works and what it
can do
these robots can be made out of almost
any material but they all follow the
same basic principle
powered by compressed air they grow from
the tip
that's good and
this allows the robot to pass through
tight spaces
and also over sticky surfaces
something like a car will get stuck to
it
it gets stuck in the wheels now if i do
the same thing with the vine robot
see the robot is able to extend it can
navigate this curvy and twisted
passageway
effortlessly which suggests some of the
applications it's well suited for
now you might think spikes would be the
downfall of an inflatable robot
but even if it's punctured as long as
you have sufficient air pressure
the robot keeps going and you might be
able to hear it
it's actually leaking now so i'll have
to turn up the pressure
this by itself is not yet a robot but
once we had steering
a camera some sensors and maybe some
intelligence as to where we're directing
it then we could say it's a robot so
this is sort of
the backbone of a robot this is what
allows us to build our type of robots
so where did the idea for this device
come from i had a vine
in my office that was on a shelf and it
was kind of out of the sunlight
and over the course of like a year or so
it slowly grew out this tendril
out and around the edge of the shelf in
towards the sunlight
that's a pretty cool thing it just did
right
so you started thinking well is there a
way you could do that robotically
the solution is really elegant in its
simplicity
just take some airtight tubing and fold
it in on itself
it's kind of like a water wiggly those
toys that are
really hard to hold when you inflate it
with compressed air
it starts growing out from the tip and
if you want the tube to always bend at a
certain spot
you could just tape the tubing on the
outside to shorten one of the sides
for example you could tape it into a
helical shape to create
a deployable antenna what about getting
them to retract
yeah that's a challenging problem when
you're in a constrained environment all
you really have to do
is pull on we call it the tail so the
material that is
passing through the core of the body you
pull on it and basically ungrows
it just goes back inside itself now if
you're in a big open area like this
and you try pulling on that instead of
inverting
so retracting it'll it tends to kind of
coil up and make a
ugly shape and the engineers have come
up with ways to retract the tube
to prevent it from buckling using
internal rollers
but the tube doesn't have to be the same
diameter the whole way along
here there's actually a much wider
section think of it like a
pillow that's packed into the end of the
robot
yeah if you could sit cross-legged
cross-legged on the table
this sounds super sketchy so it grows
underneath
the table just as usual and then as the
pillow part starts inflating
what is this not good or is this okay
it can actually lift me up
so my balance is not great as we can see
stand on it what's amazing is that this
doesn't require much pressure above
atmospheric just a tenth of an
atmosphere applied over a large
area like a square meter can lift
something as heavy
as a thousand kilograms all the while
remaining
soft
that was great that's the paradoxical
thing about pressure
you can get a large overall force with
low pressure as long as the
area is large enough what sort of what
sort of area is that that
that pillow there 600 square inches
right so with
one psi 600 pounds yeah
two psi 1200 pounds and the whole time
it feels really soft yeah because
there's a couple psi right
it's important that the device is still
soft so it doesn't hurt anyone so
you can design these things to have
cross-section that changes
along its length so it could be a very
small body
they could grow into for example a
collapsed building and
potentially lift a large object off
someone who's trapped or
maybe in a car crash or something like
that it can apply huge forces
with very soft and lightweight cheap
materials
these robots can also be deployed in
search and rescue operations
by attaching sensors like a camera onto
the front
these robots are actually really hard to
stop so you can take them
grow them into a clutter potentially a
collapsed building or something like
that
and they will continue to to go
somewhere an alternative is
they're so cheap i mean they're
basically free you could grow a hundred
of them let's say
into a collapsed building with some
sensing on them and maybe only one of
them finds somebody
but if i mean that's a huge success if
it does
but how do you keep a camera connected
to the front of the robot when it grows
out from the tip
well one way is to use an end cap which
allows that camera just to stay on the
front pushed from behind by the robot
but there are other mechanisms of
attachment the tiny wireless camera is
mounted on an external frame
but this frame interlocks with an
internal frame which is actually inside
the
pressurized part of the robot body it's
similar to how
a roller coaster's wheels go around the
track
so this prevents the camera from falling
off as the robot grows
what's really interesting is how the
vine robot can be
actively steered they attach artificial
muscles to the robot
so the way this muscle works is that if
you inflate it
it expands sideways which leads to it
contracting
in length we don't actually use these
much anymore because although it's soft
it's still somewhat stiff so what we use
instead
are simply tubes of this rip stop nylon
fabric with the braid oriented at 45
degrees so in this sense we just have
one single layer of airtight fabric
this is the main robot body here then we
have three
pneumatic muscles connected to it now
these three muscles are each connected
to their own air supply connected to
regulators over here
as the robot extends from the tip we can
steer it by shortening and lengthening
the sides
so you know just the way your hand works
is if i shorten this tendon in my arm
my hand will move this way or if i
shorten the one on this side it'll move
the other way
so our vine robot we have these muscles
along its side so as they inflate
they'll turn it one way then if i
inflate the one on the other side
it'll turn the other way so the vine
robot can fit through tight spaces
it doesn't typically get stuck on
anything and isn't bothered by sharp
objects and once you attach that camera
on the front
it's ideal for things like archaeology
the robot was actually taken to peru to
investigate some
very narrow shafts so we were looking at
this
archaeological site that was built
between somewhere between
1500 and 500 bc in the andes mountains
of peru
and it was an ancient temple that had
all these underground spaces
and part of the what the archaeologists
were doing was trying to understand what
the
spaces were for and what the people who
built them were trying to do with them
so part of that was unknown but there
were these giant rooms that they call
galleries
and then there were these small ducts or
tunnels that
were offshoots of these rooms and they
wanted to know where these ducts
led but they were too small for a person
to go in
so we were able to successfully use the
vine robot to explore
three of the tunnels that couldn't have
been seen through other means
which was super exciting and we got
video inside the entire tunnels and
and gave it to the archaeology team
there's an application where i feel
like this solution is just so obvious i
wonder why it didn't exist before
intubation is literally the process of
putting a tube
into a patient the purpose is to breathe
for the patient when the patient isn't
breathing and so traditionally you know
a highly
trained medical professional would take
their learning scope come above the
patient
and once they see the trachea
you start to pass your tube down inside
i'm almost there i can see i can see the
light
so if you can see right now i just got
it in to
the trachea oh yeah right there
and it took me a couple minutes and i
was
really kind of wrenching on this this
patient here
if there's somebody who's not breathing
every second counts
but by using a miniature version of this
vine robot
researchers are hoping to make
intubation faster and safer
you know somebody like me with no
training could pretty simply
insert this device aim towards the nose
and
just like that if you can see we've
already
intubated and all it took was a little
bit of pressurization
just like that it almost looks like a
sort of a party favor
yeah right it's like uh this reminds me
a lot of those
inflatable kind of like play-doh
structures you see it at car lots
how does it know to go down the right
tube yeah so that's one of the
kind of cool things about soft robotics
is the robot is quite compliant and we
see that in a lot of these demos you
know they can squish they can bend
and so how we've designed it is that the
main robot goes down into the esophagus
and then we have this side branch that
heads uh towards the trachea
and it's it's quite flexible and so it
basically finds the opening
so it's really neat example of kind of a
passive intelligence
mechanical intelligence some people call
it where it can find its path
even if we don't know exactly the shape
beforehand
have you tried this on a real person yet
not on a real person but we've actually
tried this in a cadaver lab and we've
shown that we
you know can move from this nice
idealized version to an
actual in vivo situation and
successfully
intubate a patient there's another
application which is
burrowing into sand or soil
when you blow compressed air into
something like sand
it fluidizes it becomes like a liquid
and that can allow the vine robot to
grow into
granular materials like sand if you've
ever been to the beach and you try to
stick like
your umbrella pole into the ground it's
fairly difficult
and then try to push that probe down
into the sand no fluidization
yeah it feels like it sort of gets
wedged
in there so now i'll turn on the air
oh yeah you can feel it immediately
oh wow yeah that's a lot
so what we've done here is essentially
we just blow a jet of air
out the front of the robot and that
loosens up the sand enough to reduce
the force of the sand so that the robot
just by tip extension can make its way
[Music]
through
[Music]
this makes vine robots an attractive
option for nasa when they look for ways
to study the surfaces of other planets
[Music]
recently on mars they tried to have a
burrowing robot but it got stuck
could you do it better basically with
this yeah that's a good question so
the mars insight mission they have this
heat probe the idea there was to be able
to sort of
hammer its way down into the core and
then place a sensor that could detect
the temperature
of mars however the problem they ran
into there is that it turned out
the material that they put it in was
more cohesive than they expected
inside the robot something would wind up
then pound it down wind up
and pound it down but it turned out
there wasn't enough friction
between the probe and the sand so what
was really happening was
it would wind up pound down wind up
pound down wind up pound down so never
actually go anywhere
the advantage of something like this
like tip extension is you'd have your
base you start the surface
and you just keep extending your way
down you're not necessarily relying
on the interaction with what is
surrounding it to make it work
what amazes me about vine robots is how
a plant
inspired this simple elegant design
it's so easy in fact that you could
build one yourself in as little as a
minute
there are instructions online that i'll
link to but from that basic design have
come
a huge variety of robots with
different applications from archaeology
to search and rescue
or intubation to space exploration
and what else can you think of to do
with it
[Music]
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