University of Colorado Boulder

<p><strong>Overview:</strong></p>
<p>As one of 34 U.S. public research institutions belonging to the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU)—and the only member in the Rocky Mountain region—University of Colorado Boulder’s (CU Boulder) goal is to directly affect Colorado communities through collaborative research, innovation and entrepreneurship. At CU Boulder, students, faculty and staff are provided with the tools they need to create a community of thinkers and doers who can benefit humanity locally, nationally and abroad.</p>
<p><strong>Research:</strong></p>
<p>Research at CU Boulder encompasses thousands of scholarly, scientific and creative endeavors at any given time, resulting in new knowledge, technologies and creative work that advance the economy, culture and health of Colorado, the nation and the world.</p>
<p>The Research &amp; Innovation Office is focused on creating impact by cultivating and supporting collaboration, transformation and leadership. At the heart of this focus are the diverse contributions of a wide range of world-class experts—working together in new and innovative ways to accelerate ideas through the entire innovation lifecycle, from idea to impact.</p>
<p><strong>Industry Partnerships:</strong></p>
<p>Ranked as one of the nation’s top 20 entrepreneurial universities and the #2 most innovative tech hub in the U.S., CU Boulder has granted 140 license and option agreements to businesses in the past five years from CU Boulder discoveries.</p>
<p>With expertise in patents, copyrights and licensing, the CU Boulder Tech Transfer Office helps translate discovery into impact through transparent, flexible, best practice intellectual property management services, and connect campus researchers with a variety of commercialization programs in the university and the community. </p>


<h1 id="background">Background</h1>
<p>The field of soft robotics has been rapidly gaining traction due to the deformable and compliant nature of the structural components. These qualities allow for improved adaptability - when compared to the capabilities of conventional, rigid robots - in unstructured environments. In the domain of both traditional and soft robotics, integrating a reliable sensing mechanism with the actuation method is necessary for the robot to interact with its environment. Therefore, having an on-board sensing mechanism is necessary for creating compact, untethered systems.</p>
<h1 id="technology-overview">Technology Overview</h1>
<p>To address some of the shortcomings of current sensing methods used for electrohydraulic actuators, such as HASELs, researchers at the University of Colorado explored the idea of using a magnetic sensing approach to measure the change in shape, specifically linear displacement, of a folded HASEL actuator. These actuators are driven by a very low current, which emits a negligible magnetic field. By sandwiching the actuator between an off-the-shelf magnetometer and a magnetic component, as shown in the figure below, they were able to map changes in magnetic field strength to changes in the actuator shape without seeing any noise from the actuator or reduction in performance.</p>
<p><img src="https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/assets.in-part.com/technologies/figures/Br9G0Y2zSwy4e27ArSXa_0235.png" alt="Figure 1" /></p>
<h1 id="benefits">Benefits</h1>
<ul>
<li>High resolution of 0.1 mm</li>
<li>Fast sampling rates up to 1 kHz</li>
<li>Modular design; easy to scale up for larger systems</li>
<li>Elegant fabrication process</li>
<li>Clean signal; decoupled from HV noise</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="applications">Applications</h1>
<ul>
<li>Soft continuum robots</li>
<li>Grippers and manipulators </li>
<li>Terrain detection for mobile robots</li>
<li>Embedded sensing for orthotics and prosthetics</li>
<li>Soft robotic platforms with low current usage</li>
</ul>
