Delta robots are deployed in many industrial processes, including pick-and-place assemblies, machining, welding and food packaging. Starting with the first version developed in the 1980s by Reymond Clavel to place chocolate pralines in their packages, Delta robots use three individually controlled and lightweight arms that guide a platform to move fast and accurately in three directions.
Over time, roboticists have designed smaller and smaller Delta robots, but shrinking them to the millimeter scale has proven fruitless.
A new design, the milliDelta robot, developed by Robert Wood’s team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) overcomes this miniaturisation challenge. In 2011, inspired by pop-up books and origami, Wood’s team developed a micro-fabrication approach that enables the assembly of robots from flat sheets of composite materials.
Pop-up MEMS (short for 'microelectromechanical systems') manufacturing has since been used for the construction of dynamic centimetre-scale machines that can walk, or, as in the case of the RoboBee, can fly. In their new study, the researchers applied their approach to develop a Delta robot measuring 15 x 15 x 20mm.
Putting the milliDelta’s potential for micromanipulations to a first test, the researchers explored their robot as a hand tremor-cancelling device. “We first mapped the paths that the tip of a toothpick circumscribed when held by an individual, computed those, and fed them into the milliDelta robot, which was able to match and cancel them out,” said co-first author Fatma Zeynep Temel. The researchers think that specialised milliDelta robots could either be added on to existing robotic devices, or be developed as standalone devices, for example, platforms for the manipulation of cells in research and clinical laboratories.
------------
No comments:
Post a Comment