Festo has released a video showing the workings of their BionicCobot, a pneumatic robot arm established for loaning a assisting hand to humans at a workstation. considering that it works intimately with humans, it has to be safe, creating no harmful movements, as well as reacting when encountering an challenge such as an arm consisting of delicate human bone. This it does utilizing pneumatics as well as rotary vanes.
Rotary vane in action
The arm has seven degrees of freedom, three in the shoulder, one in the elbow, one more in the lower arm, as well as two in the wrist. however you won’t discover any type of electric motor or gears. instead each consists of a rotary vane. Compressed air pushes on both sides of the vane. If the air pressure is the exact same on both sides of the vane then it doesn’t rotate. however with a lot more pressure on one side than the other, the vane rotates. This is much like in a human arm, where two muscles work together to bend the arm, one muscle mass contracts while the other relaxes. together they’re referred to as an antagonistic pair. In addition, each joint has a circuit card with two pressure sensors for tracking the joint.
Using pneumatics, if an challenge is encountered, the pressure can be released, making it instantaneously safe. as well as air being compressible, the joint can behave like a spring, additionally contributing to the safeness. By controlling the pressure, the spring can be made a lot more or less tense.
You can see it in action in the video below the break, together with a lot more details such as exactly how they use ROS, the popular, open system Robot operating System which we’ve seen right here a great deal before, together with their Festo valve bank, one of which our own [James Hobson] utilized for his slick elysium exoskeleton. The video likewise covers exactly how they handled running the hoses, the kinematics as well as the UI software.