technology LABORATORY ROBOTICS IMPROVED IMAGING AND TOUCH SENSORS CAN PROVIDE A VALUABLE OPTION IN LAB SETTINGS by Mike May, PhD A sort of humanlike hand swipes lightly over three tomatoes sitting in a row on a surface. Then, using its index fi nger, the robotic hand lightly taps the fi rst, then the second and the third tomatoes. Finally, with a gentle yet precise right-to-left swipe, the hand pushes the middle tomato out of the line. In another demonstration, the same robotic hand locates a tomato sitting on top of a stack of two sugar cube-like objects and tenderly lifts the tomato without tumbling the cubes. It takes advanced sen-sors to make lab robotics work so precisely and carefully. research in this lab. For example, dielectric elastomer sen-sors allow a haptic interface, like the one used in the robotic hand. Shepherd’s team 3-D prints capacitors on soft materi-als to build sensors that can “feel” even as they bend. Building sensors that resemble the ones in our fi ngers seems almost like science fi ction. Nonetheless, some of the sensors that end up in laboratory robotics in the future might come from equally surprising places. The sense of sight “Vision processing is a hot topic for lab robotics,” says Kynan Eng, cofounder and president of Switzerland-based iniLabs. “Ongoing advances in sensor performance, algo-rithms, and computer performance have opened up new possibilities for automation to achieve increased experimen-tal throughput and greater adaptability of lab equipment.” In thinking of how to control robotics, some sort of imaging might be one of the fi rst ideas that come to mind to create a sensor. But anyone who knows even a bit about how an eye works and all of the associated neural image processing—at least the parts that are known—is unlikely to suggest mimicking biology. Instead, collecting a series of images with a camera might sound simpler, but it just changes the trouble spots. “A major challenge in the fi eld is in dealing with the huge amounts of data that are generated by modern high-resolution, high-speed vision sensors,” Eng explains. To battle these challenges, researchers at the Insti-tute of Neuroinformatics of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich developed the dynamic vision sensor (DVS), which Eng describes as “the fi rst fundamental change in how computer vision is done since the inven-tion of the camera.” Conventional technologies use a series of frames to capture images, but one frame and the next include lots of the same information, which eats LabManager.com At Cornell University’s Organic Robotics Lab, a human-like hand feeling its way through a row of tomatoes will open new approaches to automating tasks in a laboratory. (Image courtesy of Huichan Zhao.) This robotic hand comes from Robert Shepherd, assis-tant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), and his colleagues in the Organic Robotics Lab. Soft sensors make up part of the 36 Lab Manager July 2017
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