It’s not every day that elephants inspire technological advances, let alone make existing technologies safer. Robotic arms can be quite dangerous, a single malfunction can cause frantic motion that could easily cause severe damage to us poor biological creatures. But the robotic arm ISELLA is built to minimize potential of such malfunction, and it’s design is inspired by an elephant’s trunk.
The arm was created by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing, Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart, who pondered the extreme agility of elephants’ trunk and consequently came up with the designs. An elephant’s trunk contains around 40,000 muscles which he uses for a variety of tasks, including tearing down trees and carrying heavy loads — but also for more delicate tasks, such as manipulating objects. Herald Staab who invented the technology in ISELLA, says that “Its suppleness and agility gave us the idea for a bionic robot arm, ISELLA”.
The main difference when compared to conventional robotic arms is that while standard arms are equipped with one motor for each articulated joint, ISELLA has two. If one motor fails, the other takes over and prevents the arms jerking out of control. The arm is actuated by a simple and low cost muscle that consists of a motor and a cord attached to moving parts — similar to how muscle tendons are attached. The motor’s drive shaft is attached to the midpoint of the cord, so that when it turns the cord pulls in both directions. Their newsrelease states they’ve dubbed this mechanism “DOHELIX” due to it’s visual similarity to the double helix.
There are ten DOHELIX muscles in the ISELLA arm which act as flexors and extensors for each of the 9 articulated joints. Without giving any specific degrees of freedoms, they say it’s as flexible as a human arm, and that they are currently working on the elbow. Amongst the uses of this tech, Staab mentions medical rehabilitation and prosthetic devices (Dude… you forgot humanoid robots!).
On the issue of prosthetics, the Icelandic company Ossur was recently awarded the gold Medical Design Excellence Award for their robotic Proprio Foot which uses A.I. technologies to a great extent (not their first award, either). Basically, instead of having the user of the robotic foot need to learn how to use it, the embedded intelligence of the foot learns how the user walks: how he moves his leg, when he puts pressure on it, etc. That way, the act of rehabilitation becomes much easier and the consequent adaptation to the leg can feel much more natural. You no longer have a dead metal stick where your leg used to be — it’s somewhat alive and aware of your movements; a more coherent part of your body.
That’s todays two cents on elephants and robotic body parts. Stay tuned for penguins and brain-machine interfaces.
The main difference when compared to conventional robotic arms is that while standard arms are equipped with one motor for each articulated joint, ISELLA has two. If one motor fails, the other takes over and prevents the arms jerking out of control. The arm is actuated by a simple and low cost muscle that consists of a motor and a cord attached to moving parts — similar to how muscle tendons are attached. The motor’s drive shaft is attached to the midpoint of the cord, so that when it turns the cord pulls in both directions. Their newsrelease states they’ve dubbed this mechanism “DOHELIX” due to it’s visual similarity to the double helix.
There are ten DOHELIX muscles in the ISELLA arm which act as flexors and extensors for each of the 9 articulated joints. Without giving any specific degrees of freedoms, they say it’s as flexible as a human arm, and that they are currently working on the elbow. Amongst the uses of this tech, Staab mentions medical rehabilitation and prosthetic devices (Dude… you forgot humanoid robots!).
On the issue of prosthetics, the Icelandic company Ossur was recently awarded the gold Medical Design Excellence Award for their robotic Proprio Foot which uses A.I. technologies to a great extent (not their first award, either). Basically, instead of having the user of the robotic foot need to learn how to use it, the embedded intelligence of the foot learns how the user walks: how he moves his leg, when he puts pressure on it, etc. That way, the act of rehabilitation becomes much easier and the consequent adaptation to the leg can feel much more natural. You no longer have a dead metal stick where your leg used to be — it’s somewhat alive and aware of your movements; a more coherent part of your body.
That’s todays two cents on elephants and robotic body parts. Stay tuned for penguins and brain-machine interfaces.
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