Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SOMIRO (Soft Milli-robots)
Reporting period: 2021-01-01 to 2022-06-30
Until today, no energy autonomous (untethered and with local intelligence) milli-robot capable of hours of continuous operation has been demonstrated. The major reason for this is power limitation: locomotion requires much power and small robots have very limited energy storage and energy harvesting. Our milli-robot will be less than 1 cm long and show how soft and stretchable systems, with undulating swimming like flat worms, require far less energy for locomotion than other systems of comparable size. For power, it will not rely on any dedicated infrastructure but only on ambient light.
The design of SOMIRO focuses on its industry transfer: industrial partners will use cutting-edge assembly technologies that can scale up to production volumes with no change in process. The bulk materials are low-cost elastomers and polymers and the electronic circuits will be based on commercial components. Throughout the project, all application scenarios and exploitation plans will be developed in close collaboration among the SOMIRO partner enterprises and end-users, and external industrial stakeholders.
On the critical component development for G1, a batch production manufacturing process was realized with high yield for the propulsion unit and swimming was showed with a tethered component. On the energy harvesting, a small four-cell solar panel showed the high capacity of 4.5 V and 12 mW at 0.25 sun. The on-site demonstration sites have been studied and it was decided that the demonstration will be made at the premises of aquaponic farmer, The Circle. When studying the environmental conditions, the most suitable spots in the basins had solar intensity never higher than 0.5 sun and most often above 0.2 sun.
In parallel, further development for the fully miniaturized and autonomous G2 milli-robot was made. Thin film sensors that operate at room temperature meet the requirements of the end user at the set power budget. On the communication, both uplink and downlink development were made. Especially, a novel technique for solar cell communication was developed with very high efficiency. Based on the G1 PCB design, a rigid-flex G2 PCB board with a first set of components was made and tested.
• Novel communication technology for solar cells.
• Novel high-performing 4-cell solar module
• Novel ultra-low-power chemical sensor
• Novel miniaturized swimming actuating fin unit
The expected results are that we will be providing an energy-efficient locomotion and physical intelligence of a swimming soft milli-robot, reaching a month-long energy autonomy. The robot will have ultra-low-power sensing, local computing and reliable wireless communication in the size constraint of the milli-robot. The millirobot will show step change performance improvement over the current state of the art. In addition, automated manufacturing, by assembly and packaging, of integrated soft milli-robots will be demonstrated.