MRI: Acquisition of a Lightweight 7-Axis Robotic Manipulator with Force Sensing for Archaeological and Engineering Research and Education

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This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award supports the acquisition of a 7-axis robotic arm for multidisciplinary research. This robotic arm will enable several research projects requiring complex and repetitive motions. For example, this instrument will enable sophisticated archaeological and engineering experiments. For archaeological research, the robot arm will replicate ancient tasks with stone and bone tools. When performing tasks such as scraping and cutting, traces of these actions develop on the surface of the tool. Comparing the wear patterns on replica tools with traces on artifacts, researchers can interpret how prehistoric people may have used these tools. Unlike a test fixture with limited motions, the robotic arm more closely mimics human movements leading to better understanding of life in the ancient past. Within engineering, this robot will be used to study what occurs in the walls of metal tubes when they are bent back and forth into new shapes numerous times, such as when a coiled tube is forced down a straight well-bore. This will aid in predicting when the tubing will rupture, improving safety and preventing environmental catastrophe. This robot arm is also expected to be used in a variety of other scientific endeavors, including how to grasp and move objects with robot hands so that robots are more useful in industry and human-facing applications. Finally, the robot will be used to engage and educate students, visitors, and the broader public. The robot will be used to perform archaeological use-wear studies on stone and bone tools, which can be compared to those on archaeological artifacts using focus-variation microscopy and imaging confocal microscopy. Crucially, the robot can mimic the variability of human motions while also providing quantitative, replicable data produced by those motions. For engineering, the robot will used to study a phenomenon called “rachetting”, which occurs when metal tubing is subject to large deformations. The robot will be able to generate the complex bending trajectories that have been associated with this phenomenon, which is difficult to perform with existing testing machines. Finally, the robot will be used to study the interaction of grasped objects with the environment as the hand holding the object approaches from various directions, as well as to generate complex, moving constraint surfaces to experimentally study the interaction of soft robots with their environment. Overall, the robotic arm will produce the complex trajectories needed to advance these multidisciplinary research projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.