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takyon writes:

Folding Drone Can Drop Into Inaccessible Mines

Inspecting old mines is a dangerous business. For humans, mines can be lethal: prone to rockfalls and filled with noxious gases. Robots can go where humans might suffocate, but even robots can only do so much when mines are inaccessible from the surface.

Now, researchers in the UK, led by Headlight AI, have developed a drone that could cast a light in the darkness. Named Prometheus, this drone can enter a mine through a borehole not much larger than a football, before unfurling its arms and flying around the void. Once down there, it can use its payload of scanning equipment to map mines where neither humans nor robots can presently go. This, the researchers hope, could make mine inspection quicker and easier. The team behind Prometheus published its design in November in the journal Robotics.

Journal Reference:
Liam Brown, Robert Clarke, Ali Akbari, et al. The Design of Prometheus: A Reconfigurable UAV for Subterranean Mine Inspection, Robotics (DOI: 10.3390/robotics9040095)

Soft Legged Robot Uses Pneumatic Circuitry to Walk Like a Turtle

Soft robots are inherently safe, highly resilient, and potentially very cheap, making them promising for a wide array of applications. But development on them has been a bit slow relative to other areas of robotics, at least partially because soft robots can't directly benefit from the massive increase in computing power and sensor and actuator availability that we've seen over the last few decades. Instead, roboticists have had to get creative to find ways of achieving the functionality of conventional robotics components using soft materials and compatible power sources.

In the current issue of Science Robotics, researchers from UC San Diego demonstrate a soft walking robot with four legs that moves with a turtle-like gait controlled by a pneumatic circuit system made from tubes and valves. This air-powered nervous system can actuate multiple degrees of freedom in sequence from a single source of pressurized air, offering a huge reduction in complexity and bringing a very basic form of decision making onto the robot itself.

Journal Reference:
Dylan Drotman, Saurabh Jadhav, David Sharp, et al. Electronics-free pneumatic circuits for controlling soft-legged robots [$], Science Robotics (DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aay2627)

Original Submission