Tuesday 29 October 2013

Voxel Project

Introduction to Voxels

Traditional robots are typically composed of hard fixed components linked together by hinges, joints and powered by motors and gears. These have success in may areas but lack the adaptability and precision that we see in the natural world, the simplest example is to list the robots capable of lifting an egg and placing in a saucepan. In recent years work has progressed on a new range of 'soft body' robots that use new composite materials and manufacturing methods to create more biologically inspired robots. The most notable of these is the robot tentacle [1], which has shown workable examples of potential use for; bomb disposal, surgery tools and cleanup tasks in hazardous environments. As impressive as this design is it is still crafted by the human hand and can only ever be as good as it's human inventor.

A parallel line of research is into evolving soft body robots within virtual worlds. These are able to utilise a number of simulated materials and produce designs optimally evolved for a given fitness function within their environment. Karl Sims is probably the father of this field producing evolved creatures back in 1994 [2], hardware and software have moved on since then and new techniques commonly use the VoxCAD voxel simulator as a testbed. A voxel is a 3D simulated cube that can be given particular material properties (stiffness, stretch, periodic inflation) these voxels are stacked together and due the the periodic inflating nature of some of these voxels the whole structure can move.


Hackademia Project

Voxels within a simulated environment can be evolved to perform a range of motion tasks and can be optimised via a fitness function to generate designs optimised for speed, energy use or specific environmental factors. However can an evolved solution within the simulated environment perform equally well when that design is copied over to the real world?

To test this hypothesis we are first going to need some voxels. Within the simulator there are typically four materials used; hard, soft and passive, periodic volume increase of 20% in 500 time steps, and out of phase 20% periodic volume increase of 20%.

Hard and soft are relatively easy to manufacture, however a periodic volume increase is much more of an issue. The biggest problem is to create a cube that will increase in volume and yet still retain the cuboid shape and not simply turning into a balloon. The second issue is how to get all faces of the cube to expand equally and also allow for a certain amount of deformation in the cube required to allow motion to happen. The final issue is the same, but how to get a consistant inflation / deflation in all of the phase and out of phase cubes simultaneously.

Below are some of the prototypes that I have been working on:

1.0 : Voxels to cuboids

After much experimenting with different ideas the only way to retain the cube shape was to inflate the design along the cubes edges. The first of may simplifications was to assume that the overall structure would only be one voxel deep, so in effect a 2D collection of voxels. This allowed me to only have to worry about inflating the front face, but to retain stability I would also inflate the rear face leaving the internal edges fixed so rather than a cube we more technically have a cuboid design.

The first step is to be able to push out the required edges, after a little trip to B&Q and raiding the lego pneumatics tray.


Syringes were cut down to reduce the size of the cuboid, this in turn reduces the amount the cuboid would need to be inflated. Next step is to link the edges together, this time a trip to JD Sport.

With squash balls (blue spot for maximum hang time), elastic bands and dowels to complete the design we can build a full cuboid.



[ After discussions with Chris Jack on how to control a collection of 25 (min required for a locomotion design) of these cuboids and a good discussion with Chrisantha on the project direction the decision was made to concentrate on controlling a single cube. This allows me to fully understand the dynamics of the problem and how to effectively scale up and link the cubes in future. This also allows us to explore the rather interesting property of controlling each edge of the cube independently and seeing what dynamics we can get and control with 12 degrees of freedom. ]

2.0  Codename: Squeaky
The first task was to move from cuboid to full cube.  For this I created a quick mockup allowing expansion in all three dimensions that would allow me to check for issues and work on the control system for independently controlling each of the 12 faces. [ Mental note; dowel, syringes and zip ties makes an awful squeaky racket!]

Awaiting a few connectors so that I can complete this project but a few issues have arose, with the extra  flexibility introduced with the extra dimension the design has a habit of rotating on the horizontal plane and collapsing upon itself. This may be simply due to unequal pressure from the elastic bands or too much flexibility in the squash balls. The design will work for testing a control systems as long as the cube does not go over it's collapse threshold point, but a better connection method is top of the todo list.


To Do:
1) New connection method (codename: ******** - well that would give it away!)
2) Control system prototype (control 12 faces independently)



[1] http://www.seas.harvard.edu/suo/papers/279.pdf
[2] http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/ALIFE10_Hiller.pdf
[3] http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/GECCO09_Hiller.pdf

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