The most popular drink of the summer season will be the SEAS-colada. This is what it is advisable to make it: gin, pineapple juice, coconut milk and a dielectric elastomer actuator-based smooth peristaltic pump. Sadly, the final element can solely be discovered within the lab of Robert Wooden, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Utilized Sciences on the Harvard John A. Paulson College of Engineering and Utilized Sciences.
Not less than, for now.
Wooden and his crew designed the pump to unravel a significant problem in smooth robotics — tips on how to exchange historically cumbersome and inflexible energy parts with smooth alternate options.
Over the previous a number of years, Wooden’s Microrobotics Lab at SEAS has been creating smooth analogues of historically inflexible robotic parts, together with valves and sensors. In fluid-driven robotic programs, pumps management the stress or circulate of the liquid that powers the robotic’s motion. Most pumps out there at this time for smooth robotics are both too massive and inflexible to suit onboard, not highly effective sufficient for actuation or solely work with particular fluids.
Wooden’s crew developed a compact, smooth pump with adjustable stress circulate versatile sufficient to pump quite a lot of fluids with various viscosity, together with gin, juice, and coconut milk, and highly effective sufficient to energy smooth haptic gadgets and a smooth robotic finger.
The pump’s measurement, energy and flexibility opens up a spread of prospects for smooth robots in quite a lot of purposes, together with meals dealing with, manufacturing, and biomedical therapeutics.
The analysis was printed lately in Science Robotics.
Peristaltic pumps are broadly utilized in trade. These easy machines use motors to compress a versatile tube, making a stress differential that forces liquid by way of the tube. These kind of pumps are particularly helpful in biomedical purposes as a result of the fluid does not contact any element of the pump itself.
“Peristaltic pumps can ship liquids with a variety of viscosities, particle-liquid suspensions, or fluids reminiscent of blood, that are difficult for different varieties of pumps,” mentioned first writer Siyi Xu, a former graduate pupil at SEAS and present postdoctoral fellow in Wooden’s lab.
Constructing off earlier analysis, Xu and the crew designed electrically powered dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) to behave because the pump’s motor and rollers. These smooth actuators have ultra-high energy density, are light-weight, and might run for a whole lot of 1000’s of cycles.
The crew designed an array of DEAs that coordinate with one another, compressing a millimeter-sized channel in a programmed sequence to supply stress waves.
The result’s a centimeter-sized pump sufficiently small to suit on board a small smooth robotic and highly effective sufficient to actuate motion, with controllable stress, circulate fee, and circulate route.
“We additionally demonstrated that we might actively tune the output from steady circulate to droplets by various the enter voltages and the outlet resistance, in our case the diameter of the blunt needle,” mentioned Xu. “This functionality could enable the pump to be helpful not just for robotics but additionally for microfluidic purposes.”
“Nearly all of smooth robots comprise inflexible parts someplace alongside their drivetrain,” mentioned Wooden. “This matter began as an effort to swap out a type of key items, the pump, with a smooth various. However alongside the best way we realized that compact smooth pumps could have far higher utility, for instance in biomedical settings for drug supply or implantable therapeutic gadgets.”
The analysis was co-authored by Cara M. Nunez and Mohammad Souri. It was supported by the Nationwide Science Basis below grant CMMI-1830291.
Video: https://youtu.be/knC9HJ6K-sU
