Precision control

Robots start shape shifting.

A group at a university in Northern Spain is studying the stimulus-response characteristics of various types of materials to make the movements of robots more precise.

The Automation Group at the Department of Electricity and Electronics of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) focussed their studies on a material in concrete: shape-memory alloys (SMAs). This alloy showed promise for micropositionng applications and is a new smart material that can remember shape.

Shape-memory alloys are capable of remembering their original size and shape despite having undergone a deformation process. The most common alloy amongst these is known as nitinol – a wire made of almost 50 per cent nickel and almost 50 per cent titanium.

Shape-memory

The UPV-EHU team built many potentially useful devices for robotics using the shape-memory material and studied more applications aimed at light or miniaturised electromechanical systems.

For instance, the UPV-EHU researchers used SMA to dramatically improve the control positioning of a robots actuators - the energised mechanism that activates a robotic device, such as a ‘claw.’ The team placed a nitinol wire between two elastic metal sheets in such a way that, when an electric current was applied to the wire, the sheets contracted and the claw completely closed, gripping small objects around it; and when the current was switched off, the claw completely opened.

The UPV/EHU team managed to enhance the opening-closing movement, to the point of precision of within a micron. Furthermore, the team designed a device which had a precision of positioning objects to within 20 nanometres.

In the future, the development could be used as prototypes for robotic devices and in micro and nanopositioning processes.

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