The Future of Robots?

I recently read an article where engineers worked out how to give robots complex instructions without electricity. This is important because it could free up more space in their main processors for them to 'think’. Currently development on robots will end up slowing to a standstill because the hardware in robots takes up so much processing power.

The scientists doing this study for new robotics hardware, and are researchers from King's College London, worked out how to give robots complex instructions without electricity by mimicking how some parts of the human body work. What they did is transmit a series of commands to devices with a new kind of circuit using pressure from a fluid inside it. This might open up the possibility of a new generation of robots whose bodies could operate independently of their built-in main processors, with the space originally used for electronically driven hardware to potentially be used instead for complex AI-powered software.

This advancement could allow future generations of robots to be more ‘aware’ of their social context or be even more dexterous. “This opens the door for a new kind of robotics in places like social care and manufacturing," said Dr. Antonio Forte, Senior Lecturer in Engineering at King's College London and senior author of this study in new robotics. "Put simply, robots are split into two parts: the brain and the body. An AI brain can help run the traffic system of a city, but many robots still struggle to open a door—why is that?” Software has been advancing very fast recently and unfortunately hardware has not been able to keep up. In making hardware that doesn’t have to be dependent on software to run it, we can offload a lot of the computations over to the hardware, sort of like the same way your brain doesn't need to tell your heart to beat.

The findings, published in Advanced Science, might also open up the ability to create robots that are able to work in situations where electricity-powered devices cannot work, such as exploration in areas with radiation like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island which destroy circuits, and in electrically-sensitive places like an MRI room. The researchers also hope that these robots can eventually be used in low-income countries which do not have reliable access to electricity or places with no access at all.

Right now, all robots need electricity and computer chips to function. A robotic 'brain' of algorithms and software in a circuit translates information to the ‘body’ or hardware through an encoder, which then performs an action. In 'soft robotics,' a field which creates devices that are to act like robotic muscles out of soft materials, it is particularly an issue as it introduces hard electronic encoders and puts strain on the software for the material to act in a complex way, like grabbing a door handle.

To eliminate this problem, the team made reconfigurable circuits with a movable valve inside a robot's hardware. This valve acts like a transistor (like in a radio) so that engineers can give signals directly to the hardware using fluctuations in pressure like binary code.This allows the robot to do complex movement without the need for the main circuit to give any instruction to it. As the next step, the researchers now are hoping to scale up their circuits from experimental hoppers and pipettes to larger robots, from crawlers used to monitor power plants to wheeled robots with entirely soft engines. Unfortunately, no clear explanation has shown how the variable pressure changes will make things move mechanically in deeper and more specific circumstances or situations, but the very idea of non-electric robots is really cool to me.

Mostafa Mousa, a Post-graduate Researcher and one of the authors of this study at King’s College in London explained the potential of these developments clearly. "Ultimately, without investment in embodied intelligence, robots will plateau. Soon, if we do not offload the computational load that modern day robots take on, algorithmic improvements will have little impact on their performance. Our work is just a first step on this path, but the future holds smarter robots with smarter bodies." 

A short works cited page.

https://builtin.com/roboticshttps://www.electronicsforu.com/news/can-a-robot-work-without-electricity#:~:text=A%20fluid%2Dbased%20circuit%20allows,sources%20are%20unavailable%20or%20unreliable.