Anyone who’s watched drone videos or an episode of “BattleBots” knows that robots can break — and often it’s because they don’t have the proper padding to protect themselves.
But this week researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new method for 3-D printing soft materials that make robots safer and more precise in their movements — and that could be used to improve the durability of drones, phones, shoes, helmets, and more.
The team’s “programmable viscoelastic material” (PVM) technique allows users to program every single part of a 3D-printed object to the exact levels of stiffness and elasticity they want, depending on the task they need for it.
For example, after 3-D printing a cube robot that moves by bouncing, the researchers outfitted it with shock-absorbing “skins” that use only 1/250 the amount of energy it transfers to the ground.
The skins also allow the robot to land nearly four times more precisely, suggesting that similar shock absorbers could be used to help extend the lifespan of delivery drones like the ones being developed by Amazon and Google.
There are many reasons for dampers, from controlling the notes of a piano, to keeping car tires on the ground, to protecting structures like radio towers from storms.
The most common damper materials are “viscoelastics” like rubber and plastic that have both solid and liquid qualities. Viscoelastics are cheap, compact, and easy to find, but are generally only commercially available in specific sizes and at specific damping levels because of how time-consuming it is to customize them.
The solution, the team realized, was 3-D printing. By being able to deposit materials with different mechanical properties into a design, 3-D printing allows users to “program” material to their exact needs for every single part of an object.
Using a standard 3-D printer, the team used a solid, a liquid, and a flexible rubber-like material called TangoBlack+ to print both the cube and its skins.
