Researchers at Georgia Tech have made a breakthrough in their work to make robots function more similarly to humans with the creation of a camera that has the potential to move similarly to the muscles of the human eye.
Researchers in the university's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering developed a robotic mechanism that can orient a camera using muscle-like cellular actuators that mimic the movements of human eye muscles rather than use traditional robotic motors.
The work is part of ongoing research into an area of robotics called compliance, which is to make robotic movements more flexible -- similar to the movements humans make, said Joshua Schultz, a Ph.D. candidate at the university and one of the researchers on the project, in an interview. Research in cellular actuation could pave the way for the design of more flexible cameras and devices for medical procedures and surgeries to complement the work of doctors and clinicians, he said.
Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate Joshua Schultz makes some final adjustments to the camera positioning mechanism used in the muscle-like cellular actuators of the robot vision system.
Whereas traditional motors that power robotic actuation, or movements, tend to use one motor unit per movement, Schultz told us:
...because we are connected by flexible tissues, the human body turns on as many motor units as it needs to provide force. The brain isn't turning a knob and increasing or decreasing the activation level of muscle fibers. Because we have lots of muscle fibers that are coupled with flexible tissue, this allows us to move smoothly even with impulsive on/off transitions.
This type of movement can revolutionize the work of cameras and other devices that interact with humans in medical scenarios, such as during MRIs or surgeries, because the movements of the robots would be more natural. "There are a lot of us that think that compliance is the key to making medical devices more effective," Schultz said.
To achieve more compliance, Schultz and his colleagues, including Professor Jun Ueda, one of the researchers who pioneered the work at MIT in the early part of the decade, used cellular actuation using piezoelectric stacks.
Piezoelectrics use ceramic material that expands or contracts when an electrical charge is applied to it, which allows the transformation of input signals into a robotic motion. However, generally the displacement in ceramic piezoelectric reactions is low, which does not lend itself to a wide range of movement.
Building upon previous research done by Ueda and other researchers at MIT, Schultz and the Georgia Tech team took a multistage approach to creating cellular actuators for the camera, designing a mechanism that uses electrical inputs and outputs in a rapid series to increase the displacement of the output. The team used 16 amplified piezoelectric stacks per side placed inside a rhomboidal mechanism to address the need for more layers of amplification, according to researchers.
I agree plasticmaster. Watching nature will likely provide much of the new developments in robotics. My dad, who worked in aerospace, said you can see the dynamics of flight just by putting your hand outside the window when you're in a fast-moving car. That says it all.
We've got to start somewhere. Using the building blocks we have currently at our disposal provide us with the information we need to proceed to the next logical step. We did it with airplanes (studying birds and bird flight). Vision, using amplified piezoelectric actuators is a fantastic step forward in developing the next stage of robotics whether microscopically or in a much larger sense.
Good points, Scott. A lot of the value would have to be in the processing of the collected data. The details you point out include processing that goes on in our brains.
This is an interesting development, though it's helpful to understand that vision encompasse more than eye movement. There is the ability to accommodate wide variations in ambient light, to change focus on-the-fly smoothly, and to use the internal image-processing "firmware" of the brain to re-map conflicting or confusing imagery into a rational construct. Eyes are pretty amazing organs that must balance the interplay of a lot of variables to create what we call vision.
Good point, Asupnekar. There seems to be a proclivity to mimicking human movement and capabilities with robots. Yet other natural occurrences -- like your vision example of a fish -- are likely to be superior to human capabilities.
Acctually, it depends on what you are doing. The greatest advancement of science, wealth and welfare in history has come since the digital revolution. If you want to get philosophical, the universe is inherently mathematical. By applying digital techniques we have made tremendous advances. Frankly, there are lots of things we want done that are better done by computers than by natural methods. Nature tends to be very inefficient, using more resources to do a task than is strictly necessary. Natural language, for example, is terriably inefficient as far as information content.
Even in the area of accumulating and using knowledge, we have advanced more in the digital age, which encompasses the last sixty years or so, than in all of previous human history. I don't see this as "unnatural". We got here by using our natural talents and intelligence, but there is something about thinking digitally and mathematically that has given our knowledge a whole new dimension.
I was actually thinking that there are a lot of weaknesses in trying to copy the motion the human eye. The two main things that popped into my mind was the relative lack of peripheral vision (compared with other animals) the the fact that it still needs to be mounted on a "neck" to see much of the field.
Yes, I am also fully agree with you both (Rob and Naperlou). In this case we can take the best example from nature i.e of a fish. If we consider the motion of fish eye its almost end to end from all directions and if this current invention matches with that then i feel that's the big acheivement.
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