The offshore oil and gas industry is an extreme environment for humans and the industry faces increasing pressure to remove people from these dangerous offshore sites. Robotics is poised to carry out the day-to-day inspection, repair and maintenance of topside and marine offshore infrastructure. But often the power supplies that are used to provide regulated voltages to drive motors, relays, and power electronic controls of robots can produce heat and cause sparks. There is a serious risk in such environments where flammable liquid and gases in the atmosphere are prone to ignite. ATEX certification is a European Union directive on electrical equipment to ensure safety in such extreme environments. But implementing designs that meet this standard is time-consuming and can significantly add to the cost of operations.
How can we implement robots while mitigating the risk of igniting the atmosphere without increasing cost? Soft robots are often made with soft materials and can be actuated pneumatically, without electronics. In this work, we have implemented an electronics-free control system by replacing the fundamental building block of logical operation in electronics – the transistor. We have executed this new control architecture using fluidic switches consisting of a thin layer of silicone sandwiched between two sheets of plastic. We have arranged the fluidic switch to control a gate between the vacuum source and an atmospheric vent. This way we can use many fluidic transistors from a single vacuum input to remove the requirements for electronic or electro-pneumatic control.
Most soft robots use a controller located outside of the system. When the control system is offloaded external to a robot there are physical maximum constraints to control the soft system. There are untethered soft robots that use microcontrollers to direct flow to the actuators, but this method increases the capabilities of the soft robot to be used in new areas of research and exploit the advantages of soft systems.
This April, I will present this work at the Second IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics in Seoul, South Korea. This is the largest international conference in this field in an exciting new field of robotics.
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