Shock Absorbing Skins

Anyone who's watched drone videos or an episode of "BattleBots" knows that robots can break -- and often it's because they don't have the proper padding to protect themselves. This is why scientist have come up with ways to make robots absorb more contact to protect themselves from breaking down easily from contact. 

This is a picture of a group at MIT researchers outfitted their cube robot with shock-absorbing "skins" (left) that transfer less than half of the energy that would normally be transferred to the ground. This mini robot was taken from a 3-D printer which these researchers have been working on new soft material that makes robots safer and their movements more precise.

The team created a program called PVM which is programable viscoelastic material which allows people using 3-D printers to he exact levels of stiffness and elasticity they want, depending on the task they need for it. For example, after 3-D printing a cube robot that moves by bouncing, the researchers outfitted it with shock-absorbing "skins" that use only 1/250 the amount of energy it transfers to the ground. A researcher that oversaw the project and wrote a paper on it says "That reduction makes all the difference for preventing a rotor from breaking off of a drone or a sensor from cracking when it hits the floor," says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, who oversaw the project and co-wrote a related paper. "These materials allow us to 3-D print robots with visco-elastic properties that can be inputted by the user at print-time as part of the fabrication process."

The skin of the robots have been made so that the landing of these robots is four times as precise as it was before. Similar shock absorbers could be used to lengthen the life of the droid robots used by companies such as Google and Amazon. 

There are many reasons for dampers, from controlling the notes of a piano, to keeping car tires on the ground, to protecting structures like radio towers from storms. The most common dampers are those of both solid and liquid qualities made out of plastic or rubber. By being able to deposit materials with different mechanical properties into a design, 3-D printing allows users to "program" material to their exact needs for every single part of an object. A scientists working at MIT said, "It's hard to customize soft objects using existing fabrication methods, since you need to do injection moulding or some other industrial process," says Lipton. "3-D printing opens up more possibilities and lets us ask the question, 'can we make things we couldn't make before?" Using a 3- D printer they are able to make anything like their skins or cubes out of cost efficient materials such as plastic and rubber to create shock absorbing materials that could change injuries on a dramatic scale.