Introduced a robot for safe landing from a height without a parachute

A group of engineers from the University of Berkeley, Squishy Robotics and NASA developers start field tests of an "elastic-rigid" robot for safe landing from a height without a parachute. Initially, such robots were of interest to scientists from the Aeronautics and Space Agency for dropping from spacecraft to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. But on Earth, too, there are many uses for robotic devices that can be quickly dropped in the right place at the right time. For example, in a zone of natural disasters or in the centers of a man-made disaster. Then the robots, even before the rescuers arrive, will be able to assess the level of danger on the ground, which will reduce the risk during rescue operations.

As part of field tests, scientists began to cooperate with rescue services in Houston and Los Angeles County. As seen in the video, the soccer ball-like robot, surrounded by a structure of three pairs of tubes with spring-loaded braces, is dropped from a helicopter from a height of 600 feet (183 meters) and remains operational after free-falling to the ground.

The scheme implemented in the design of a “pliable” robot is called “tensegrity” from a combination of the words tensional and integrity (in Russian, tension and integrity). Rigid pipes, inside of which cables are stretched, constantly experience compression force, and extensions experience tension. Taken together, such a scheme is resistant to mechanical deformations during impacts. In addition, by alternately controlling the tension of the cables, the robot can be made to move from one point in space to another.

Alice Agogino, a professor of mechanics at Berkeley University, says that over the past 20 years, about 400 Red Cross and Red Crescent employees, who are often the first to appear in a disaster area, have died. If they had had robots ready to drop quickly before rescuers arrived, many of these deaths could have been avoided. Perhaps in the future it will be so, and “soft” robots will become a familiar tool for rescuers on Earth before flying to Titan.

Source: 3dnews.ru