robots sold in 2010 and School of Electrical and 7,000 2011 constitutes 29% of the Computer Engineering, Unitotal units sold between versity of Tehran, at mora6,000 1998 and 2011, i.e., 110,000
[email protected]. 5,000 units, representing the sig4,000 nificant growth of service References 3,000 [1] K. Kawamura, S. Bagchi, M. robot usage since 1995. Iskarous, and M. Bishay, “Intelligent 2,000 Figure 2 shows the statisrobotic systems in service of the disa1,000 tics of professional service bled,” IEEE Trans. Rehab. Eng., vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 14–21, 1995. robots sold in 2010 and 0 [2] Internat iona l Federat ion of Defense Field Logistics Medical 2011. In Figure 2, the robots Robotics. Service robots: Provisional sold in construction, mobile definition of service robots. [Online]. platforms, cleaning, inspec- Figure 2. The number of professional service robots sold in 2011 Av a i l a b l e : ht t p : // w w w. i f r. o r g / (blue) and 2010 (red). service-robots/ tion, under water, and [3] H. I. Christensen. (2013, Mar.). A search and rescue are not roadmap for US robotics: From Internet to robotics. [Online]. Available: http:// shown because of the small number of www.robotics-vo.us/ units sold. One of the very small mar[4] P. Fiorini, K. Kawamura, and E. Prassler, kets that needs further attention is “Cleaning and household robots,” J. Auton. Robot., handicap-assistant robots, with 156 vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 207–209, Dec. 2000. [5] S. Lee, E. Prassler, R. Tuokko, and H. Moradi, units sold in 2011 and 46 units in 2010. “The standardization and roadmapping initiatives Because these robots are very highby the industrial activity board” IEEE Robot. tech, they need further research to preAutomat. Mag., vol. 12, no. 4, p. 98, Dec. 2005. pare them for the market. [6] S. Lee and H. Moradi, “RAS IAB’s roadmap 3. The Service Robot TC retirement work shop on i ntel l igent ser v ice robot s ,” Finally, it is interesting to mention Figure ceremony at ICRA 2013: TC Chairs Erwin IEEE Robot. Automat. Mag., vol. 12, no. 1, p. 12, that the number of robots sold in the Prassler and Paolo Fiorini with RAS Mar. 2005. personal and domestic market grew President David Orin, center. [7] H. Moradi, “Roadmaps for Robotics and 15% in 2011 compared with 2010, i.e., Automation,” IEEE Robot. Automat. Mag., vol. 16, from ~2,170,000 to 2,500,000. and will need more attention from RAS: no. 3, p. 98, Sept. 2009. 1) educational robotics, 2) domestic ser- [8] Service Robots Technical Committee. Robotics The Future vice robots, and 3) intelligent compan- and Automation Society. [Online]. Available: http://www.service-robots.org/ Although the Service Robots TC is retir- ion robots such as intelligent toys. [9] International Federation of Robotics. (2012). ing, the TC cochairs, past and present, For more information, contact the Service robot statistics. [Online]. Available: http:// believe that the following areas will grow corresponding author, H. Adi Moradi, www.ifr.org/servicerobots/statistics/
Soft Robotics By Surya G. Nurzaman, Fumiya Iida, Cecilia Laschi, Akio Ishiguro, and Robert Wood
T
he use of soft and deformable materials in robotic systems has increasingly gained interest in recent years. Because of its potential to deal with uncertain and unstructured task environments, soft-body robotic systems are expected to be able to accomplish tasks such as grasping and manipulation of unknown objects, locomotion in rough terrains, and performDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2013.2279342 Date of publication: 11 September 2013
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ing flexible interactions between robots and living cells or human bodies. In addition, soft robotics pushes the boundary of visionary research topics such as growing, selfrepairing, and self-replicating robots. Examples of the recent major achievements in soft robotics are shown in Figure 1. As compared with other robotic systems, soft robots are characterized by a number of unique aspects: 1) elastic and deformable bodies, 2) a large number of degrees of freedom,
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3) use of unconventional materials to compose the body, and 4) involvement of intrinsic passive mechanical dynamics. Related to this, creating soft robots also increases our understanding of a modern view of intelligence, the so-called embodied intelligence or morphological computation, which gives more importance to the role of the body and its physical interaction with the environment. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Technical Committee (TC) on Soft Robotics was established in October
and simulation techniques of soft bodies, 5) fabrication and control of soft bodies, 6) interdisciplinary interaction with biological/medical sciences, material sciences, chemistry, and other related disciplines, and 7) soft robotics applications.
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Figure 1. (a) A soft gripper based on jamming granular material, which is able to pick up unfamiliar objects with a widely varying shape and surface, (b) an octopus-inspired robot whose arms are modeled based on the characteristic muscle of the octopus, (c) a caterpillar-inspired soft bodied rolling robot, and (d) a foldable robotic system based on the concept of origami design. [Images courtesy of Hod Lipson (Cornell University), Cecilia Laschi (SSSA; image: London Science Museum/Jennie Hills), Barry A. Trimmer (Tufts University), and Jamie Paik (EPFL).]
Figure 2. The participants of ETH Summer School on Soft Robotics, June 2012.
2012 to bring together scientists and engineers with different backgrounds and disciplines, providing the opportunity to share the latest publications, technologies, experiences, and other relevant information among those with a similar interests in soft-body robotic systems. The Organizational Structure and Priority Areas The main organizational structure of the TC consists of the four cochairs and several founding members. The
current cochairs of the TC are Fumiya Iida, Cecilia Laschi, Akio Ishiguro, and Robert Wood. The founding members are Dario Floreano, Rolf Pfeifer, Carmel Majidi, Kyujin Cho, Hod Lipson, Daniela Rus, Barry A. Trimmer, and Maarja Kruusmaa. As the first crucial effort to organize the TC, it was decided that the priority areas for the TC would include 1) scientific problems related to soft-bodied robots, 2) soft materials for robots, 3) soft actuators and sensors, 4) modeling
Activities Organized by or Related to the TC Toward the establishment of the TC, a wide range of activities has been initiated in the last few years: ●● Organized sessions on soft robotics and on smart materials and actuators for soft robotics in the IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics (BioRob 2012), 24–27 June 2012 ●● E i d g e n ö s s i s c h e Te c h n i s c h e Hochschule (ETH) Summer School on Soft Robotics (Figure 2), Zürich, Switzerland, 18–22 June 2012 ●● Special Issue on Soft Robotics in Journal of Advanced Robotics 26(7), 2012 ●● Special Session on Soft Robotics at the 2011 European Future Technologies Conference (FET11), Budapest, 4–6 May 2011 ●● Swiss–Japan Joint Seminar on Soft Robotics: Morphology, Materials, and Functionalities, University of Tokyo, 20–23 June 2010. Since its official formation, the TC has been organizing the activities in a more effective way and, in 2013 alone, there are several major events: ●● International Workshop on Soft Robotics and Morphological Computation, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland, 14–19 July 2013 ●● Organized sessions on soft technologies for wearable robots at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 3–7 November 2013. Because of the nature of soft robotics as an interdisciplinary field, the workshop at Monte Verità, for example, will be attended by more than 100 participants from all over the world with 17 invited speakers from various scientific disciplines. The speakers include
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The second program is a fast track, and the mentors are mentoring program. This proalways kept up to date with gram has two aspects: 1) for the advances or stagnation of undergraduate students and the youngest Women in Engi2) for early career researchers neering’s (WIE’s) conditions. (at the post-doctoral and Promoting WIE is an assistant professor level). A important duty for me that I pool of volunteer graduate enjoy fulfilling. I have had the students has been assembled chance to choose freely and to offer mentoring for underentirely my career path and 2. The lecture before the experimental program graduates. Students can Figure am fully supported in each explaining the aim of the experiments. choose a mentor depending decision by my family, my on their future career path, superiors, and my peers. I major, or affinity. The menhope that each young girl can tors offer counseling, discusbe offered the same opportusions, tips, and experiences. nity and, for that, I want to For the researchers, a pool of reassure them and their parfaculty members has been ents that there is nothing that assembled to answer mentees’ a woman cannot do. In parneeds. Ideally, mentor and ticular, robotics is such a mentee pick each other. broad and emerging field that There is only one rule: the there is room for every talmentee and mentor should ented and motivated young contact each other at least Figure 3. The demo of the NAO robot before programming it to woman. More than covering once a month to discuss the analyze its center of pressure (CoP) trajectory with a Nintendo Wii. the fields of mechanical engipoints the mentee wants clarneering, electrical engineerified or problems for which she wants career choices and students’ supervision. ing, and computer science, robotics also some advice. I have mentored a few I hope to be good at listening and give makes it possible to work closely in colyoung researchers in our department for some good pieces of advice. Of course, laboration with so many other fields, three years now, and I found it very each person’s experience is personal and including medicine, psychology, design, enjoyable. It does not take up much of unique, but it is important to share with and arts, that there is definitely a career my time; we sometimes meet but often each other what we have learned from path that fits each individual. exchange e-mails. We talk a lot about our mistakes. The mentees can be on the
tc spotlight (continued from p. 25) George M. Whitesides (Harvard University), Peter Fratzl (Max Planck Institute), Brad Nelson (ETH Zürich), Fritz Vollrath (University of Oxford), and Norman Packard (European Centre for Living Technology). To promote this research field, the cochair of the TC participates on the Editorial Board of Soft Robotics, a peerreviewed journal dedicated to the science and engineering of soft materials in mobile machines, with the first issue available in spring 2014. The cochair also coordinates Robosoft, coordination actions on activities related to soft robotics research on a European scale. Robosoft is sponsored by E.U. Framework Programme 7 and will be started in October 2013.
Future Challenges In the next ten years, many scientific and technological challenges will be addressed by the TC . The first challenge is to meet the requirement of developing functional and intelligent materials with controllable mechanical properties and adaptive functions for sensing and actuating, which are capable of being fabricated and assembled, mass producible, and safe. The second is obtaining a thorough understanding of the way soft bodies are used in animals on the basis of the guidance from biology and other related disciplines. Third, the establishment of a simulation and modeling technique of soft bodies behavior, particularly for boosting collaboration among researchers
from various disciplines. Finally, the integration aspects that will make the research ready for practical applications, such as biomedical or rescue scenarios, must be explored. To address the challenges effectively, the TC has formed several communication channels. The main one is a public homepage (softrobotics.org) and its associated mailing list, with 265 registered e-mail addresses as of June 2013. Since May 2013, the TC produced a bimonthly newsletter to organize and promote the latest achievement of its members. We always encourage new members to join us. Anyone can subscribe to the mailing list by visiting https://sympa. ethz.ch/sympa/info/softrobotics.
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