Development and evolutionary-based optimal design of novel soft walking/jumping robots

Soft robots

I had the great pleasure and luck to realize my research visit at RITMO during September 2020 ¨C July 2021, working with Associate Professor Kyrre Glette as my supervisor. The research visit was supported by Academy of Finland-funded projects for postdoctoral researchers. The main goal of my visit was to develop and realize fully functional prototypes of a new type of soft walking/jumping robot. Traditionally, robots are built by using rigid materials and rigid body-based mechanisms (e.g. industrial robots). Recently a new class of robots called soft robots emerged, established as a new research field. Soft robots are built from soft and/or elastic materials, and they utilized elastic deformation of their body or segments to realize motion/force transmission. The main advantages of soft robots over traditional ones are easy and low-cost to build, safe human-robot interaction, and can suppress limited degrees of freedom of rigid robots.

A lot of soft robotic concepts are realized by utilizing only silicone materials and soft pneumatic-based actuation techniques (soft pneumatic actuators), where other directions are not extensively explored. The main goals of our work were:

1. To explore other material sets for developing soft robot structures and actuation techniques that were not investigated or introduce before in the general soft robotics field,
2. As one example of the above to develop walking/jumping soft robots, that can work both on the ground and in water as an advantage, can go over different terrains, for potential applications like exploration missions, remote maintenance, and inspection, transport of small loads, sample collection,
3. Develop a unified computational synthesis framework for the optimal design of such soft robots by using evolutionary algorithms (many different possible robot designs realized with the above-proposed approach make it difficult for people to intuitively realize optimal robot design for the given task),
4. Providing a new robotics platform for investigating different evolutionary algorithms, Artificial intelligence, and Machine Learning algorithms.

I had great fun and fulfilment working on these little robotic creatures (they do behave similarly like some biological organisms) that we called soft robotic entities. The work led to the successful realization of the computational framework (software) for optimal synthesis of these walking/jumping robots by using an evolutionary optimization approach. Utilizing this we managed to realize many different robotic designs that have different performances (walking speed, transportability, power consumption). Further work led to the realization of a lot of physical prototypes, experiments and tests, doing a substantial amount of work in figuring out the right material and actuation techniques for these robots. After a lot of trial and error, failures, attempts, a lot of hard work, and frustration, we were so excited to manage to realize fully functional prototypes of soft walking/jumping robots! It was fun to see how they can autonomously work, walk, jump, carry some payload. The robots we developed can work both on the ground and underwater, which broadens their scope of application.   

Connecting with music

Recently we are trying to connect these robots with music, as soft walking/jumping robots developed during my time here, can realize dance-like moves. The main idea (proposed by Prof. Alexander Refsum Jensenius) is to control the robot motion by using analogy synths, leading to controlling the robots with musical rhythms. Although in its early phase, this research direction looks promising, and in a long run, we hope it will lead to some more exciting things eventually introducing a novel soft robotic platform for studying key RITMO objectives. Maybe also lead to some new future joint projects.

I had several opportunities to present the work we have done, also at the Food & Paper series at RITMO, receiving a lot of great feedback and positive encouragement to continue working in this direction.

Continued collaboration

I had a great and fun time staying at RITMO. Everybody welcomed me with an open heart and open-mid, trying to help me every step during my research here. A lot of interesting discussions with different people spark some interesting ideas for future work. It is a vibrant community and interdisciplinary research environment, full of interesting and passionate people for building a different kind of future. It was a fruitful period of my life, and it broadened my perspective and understanding of the music and art world. Also started some new cross disciplinary work combining different research fields. I am grateful to all the nice people at RITMO for such a great opportunity to be a part of this special place and research centre. I hope we will continue collaborating and working on some exciting things in the future. Thanks once again to all the RITMO people for amazing time and experience I had during my time as visiting researcher.