What does the robotic lightning bug have to do with cars and mobility? As flying cars and personal jetpacks are positioned as the next big thing in mobility, technology will need to find more compact, lighter and cheaper ways forward. These tiny flying robots called fireflies, created at MIT, could be the source of a whole new way to apply all of the above technologies to electric vehicles. And it’s easy to track and communicate with the robot.
How does MIT technology create artificial muscles for robots?
It started with discovering how to make electroluminescent artificial muscles. They control their wings and also emit colored lights when they fly. Ultrathin elastomer layers combined with carbon nanotube electrodes make up the muscles. They are stacked and rolled into a cylinder. Then the voltage is the cylinder. These electrodes squeeze the elastomer, causing the wings to flap.
The elastomer is mixed with zinc sulfate particles to produce luminescence. This involves a few extra steps to make it work. These include making the cylinder transparent and applying a strong high-frequency electric field. Thereby, the zinc particles and electrons emit subatomic photon particles. So the combination of strong electric fields and high frequencies lights up the robotic fireflies.
Why do robot fireflies’ wings glow?
“Traditionally, electroluminescent materials have been very expensive in energy, but in a sense, we get electroluminescence for free because we’re just using the electric field at the frequency needed for flight,” said Kevin Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Chen said the MIT department. “We don’t need new drives, new wires, or anything. It only takes about 3 percent of the energy to emit light,” he told scitechdaily.
But there was a lot of trial and error throughout the development phase. “We paid great attention to maintaining the quality of the elastomer layer between the electrodes,” said EECS graduate student Suhan Kim. “Adding these particles is almost like adding dust to our elastomer layer. It took a lot of different methods and a lot of testing, but we came up with a way to ensure the quality of the actuator.”
How much does the robot firefly weigh?
All of this helps create robots that weigh no more than a paper clip. The advantage of glowing muscles is that in search and rescue in dark environments, such as collapsed buildings or caves, its light can be used to signal where it is and what it detects. The actuators now emit multi-colored and patterned light. And their light weight allows them to carry additional sensors for tracking by infrared cameras. Can this be applied to flying cars?
They even manipulated the lights with masks and colored particles to spell out “MIT” in patterns of light. The iPhone can track each actuator as a marker for tracking. By detecting each color and marker, a computer program can track its position and height. It becomes an inexpensive infrared motion capture system.
“Compared to state-of-the-art technology, we are very proud of how good the tracking results are. Compared to the tens of thousands of dollars in cost of these large motion tracking systems, we are using cheap hardware and the tracking results are very close,” Chen said . “The wingbeat synchronized flash generation demonstrated in this work will enable easier motion tracking and flight control of multiple microrobots in low-light environments both indoors and outdoors,” said Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram.
Related: Why does Toyota make robots?