The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently held the 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2023), hosted by the National University of Singapore (NUS), which is the only global flagship academic conference for soft robotics.
The RoboSoft 2023 competition was held at this conference to “challenge state-of-the-art soft robots” and “push the performance of soft robots beyond the state-of-the-art to increase their impact value”.
Teams from Stanford University in the United States, the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and many other famous universities participated in the competition.
The Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) also took part in the finals, with their team, Pipe Finder, placing second in the RoboSoft Competition Locomotion Group under the guidance of Hongqiang WANG, Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering at SUSTech. They were also the only Chinese team to come away from the competition with a prize.
The SUSTech team comprised of undergraduate students Yifei CHEN, Deyu YANG, Ziyu LIU, and Yijun FANG. It was the only team in the competition made up of undergraduates. SUSTech is the only institute that has won three consecutive awards in the past three years.
This mobile robot competition not only tests the adaptability, autonomous movement, system integration, and other contents of robots in complex pipelines, but also emphasizes the efficiency of robot movement and the functionality of inspection pipelines.
The wheel-leg combined robot used by Pipe Finder uses an origami metamaterial structure to achieve an anisotropic rigid structure, giving the robot the ability to shrink, change, and adjust direction. This means that the robot can flexibly and efficiently pass through the pipeline environment with different diameters, sizes, and obstacles.
The robot uses inertial sensors to adjust its position and posture, and equipped with photoelectric sensors, it can realize the practical task of detecting the condition of the pipeline emphasized by the organizer.
The team members noted that they could see the control and design of cutting-edge soft robots at RoboSoft 2023. Through exchanges with others at the conference, they have gained a new understanding of the potential of soft robots to solve practical problems.