Human-Safe Robots for Industrial and Domestic Robotic Applications

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For decades now, humankind has envisioned a future where robots permeate our daily lives, assisting and facilitating our activities. However, despite incremental advances, a world of ubiquitous robotics remains, to date, confined to science fiction. A novel actuation mechanism can now realize this dream by utilizing unique properties of magneto-rheological (MR) fluids. MR fluids are a class of smart materials that can instantaneously, and reversibly, alter their rheological properties under the application of an external magnetic field. By virtue of their lightness and compliance, actuators developed with such fluids provide an alternative actuation solution with inherent properties necessary to fulfill safety. Unlike traditional electromotor-based actuators that are predominantly used in robotics, MR-based actuators offer characteristics that are similar to human actuation mechanism. At the same time, these actuators can deliver large actuation torque required in high performance tasks by altering the rheological properties of the MR fluids. In other words, MR-based actuators can provide both safe and perfromant actuation, and ergo, the robots developed under this actuation paradigm can be guaranteed to be human-safe.