2024-02-06 08:15:43
For the coming years and decades, NASA plans to send human crews back to the Moon, build a space station in lunar orbit, establish a permanent base on the lunar surface and, if all goes well, send astronauts to Mars.
These missions will require robots to perform the toughest or most dangerous jobs and to assist human astronauts in other tasks.
NASA is working on new design ideas for such robots, and to this end it has the collaboration of several entities, including the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University in the United States.
Since 2019, Justin Werfe’s team at SEAS has been developing technologies for autonomous robots that repair or replace damaged components on a spacecraft or an off-world base, and perform many other tasks.
A decisive advance that this team has achieved is a new class of robotic arms, equipped with “hands” whose human-like manual dexterity enables them to perform all types of jobs.
One of the biggest challenges when designing robots for these future space missions is the necessary multifunctionality. Most industrial robots, such as those used to make cars, are highly specialized and only perform a few specific tasks. But hardly a spaceship or a base on another world will have enough space to house dozens of specialized robots. Instead, a single or a few robots, capable of performing many different tasks, including emergency repairs, will have to suffice.
An essential requirement to achieve robots like this is that they are capable of picking up, holding and manipulating all types of objects.
Human hands can adapt to many functions, including those that require great precision, those that require applying great force, or those that require the lightest possible grip to avoid breaking the grasped object. The new design approach followed by Werfe and his colleagues seeks to achieve that versatility of the human hand.
The latest advance achieved by the team, for which they have had the help of experts from the National University of Busan in South Korea, consists of a hand with fingers that can be reconfigured to change the number of joints in the finger.
Examples of the high degree of adaptation of the new robotic hand to the various types of objects it must grasp. (Photos: Harvard SEAS. CC BY)
The new robotic hand has three general configurations. In the first, the fingers are short and do not bend, which allows them to grasp objects with strength and security. In the second configuration, the fingers gain a joint to allow the hand to manipulate objects, enabling it to move and rotate them without letting go. The latter configuration adds two more joints, allowing the fingers to passively adapt to the shape of an object and distribute contact pressure, which is useful for grasping objects that are irregular in shape or that are delicate and could break or dent with contact. excessive pressure. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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