Efficient, Compact High-Voltage Power Delivery and Management for Soft Robots
Abstract
Intelligent mechanical/electrical devices, i.e. robots, have been increasingly more integrated with human life, making revolutionary changes in our productivity at an unprecedented rate. The market size of robotic prosthetics alone was estimated at $790.8 million in 2016 and is expected to growto $1.76 billion by 2025, i.e. CAGR of 9.2%. Examples of robots can be found everywhere from factories, infrastructure smart machines, to prosthetic limbs and artificial muscles. They can bedivided into two categories:1. The robots in factories and other commercial structured environments favoring extra strengthand often constructed with rigid and heavier components, and2. Those that are more directly connected to human and nature requiring soft, versatile, lightweight, and compact materials to conform to their environment.Particularly, the second category, i.e. soft robots, has recently attracted a lot of attention from academic research and industry because of their promise for fundamentally new and transformative methods in which humans can interact with machines; for example, drastically different lines of soft prostheses, medical devices, and autonomous robotic devices.The success of soft robotic systems critically relies on their material, mechanical, and electrical components to achieve flexibility, scalability, small unit size, and low weight for both mechanical and electrical parts of the systems. While there are recent breakthroughs and remarkable achievementsin research and developments of soft robots, there are a clear lack of attention and absence of developments, and innovations on the electrical and electronic parts to satisfy the needs of the mechanical parts and the whole soft robotic systems. In particular, many soft robots require highvoltage(~10 kV), high-power (~10s W) supply for their mechanical actuators. However, this type of power supply is not available in an acceptable form factor and with acceptable efficiency in todays commercial market and research environments - available parts are either too large or too low power to be integrated in soft robotic systems.This project is to address the absence of high-power, high-voltage, small form-factor supplies and drivers suitable for soft robotics at present, as well as to aim at designing an efficient, compact power delivery and management module that can be scaled up to enable unique features and capabilities in current and future soft robots. Particularly, with the support of this ONR DURIP program the research team in this project propose a new hybrid converter architecture that can support an extremely large conversion from ~10VDC input to 10kV output with output regulation in a compact size. At the end of the project, the research team aim at developing and demonstrating a 3kW 30-channel PowerSet prototype that can support 10V-to-10kV with the output current of 10mA for each module, achieving a power density of 3kW/ft3. If successful, the device created in this project can enable technologies that were not possible before, for example, a soft propulsion system that can carry operationally-relevant payload sizes quietly, or a soft robot that can lift itemsheavier than a person could lift without potentially harming people around it.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 20, 2020
- Source ID
- N000142012229
Entities
People
- Hanh-phuc Le
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- Regents of the University of Colorado
- United States Navy