Scientific work is sometimes slow but rewarding when you achieve your goal. See the case of these researchers from Italian Institute of Technology.
As we showed here in Digital Lookthey presented in August last year, The design of a robot that wore a kind of armor of Iron Man. It is the set of a jetpack (jet backpack) with two other thrusters coming out of the hands of the humanoid.
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Today, almost 10 months later, the team announced a significant advance of the experiment: IronCub3 managed to take a takeoff and a stable (albeit short) flight for the first time.
As you can see from the video, the time it is in the air is quite short. This demonstrates the difficulty of promoting a flight like this – and indicates that the Tony Stark From the real world would not have an easy life.
Imagine controlling the 4 thrusters in a harmonious and coordinated way not to unbalance in the air. Add this to natural factors, such as the wind. This is the challenge of IRONCUB3. Oh, and he did almost everything “alone”: thanks to flight control systems based on Artificial intelligence.
Meet IRONCUB3
- According to scientists, humanoid has several parts of titanium, as well as coatings to support heat.
- This is because the 4 thrusters reach a temperature of almost 800ºC.
- As you can see from the photos, it is soft and is less than 1 meter high.
- Its total weight, along with the jets, is about 70 pounds.
- The thrust for the flight (ie the vertical force) reaches the 1,000 N (about 225 lbf).
- Inside, the robot It has a set of onboard sensors, which includes an inertial measurement unit, strength sensors and a real-depth camera.
- Researchers say this package is robust enough to deal with extreme operating environments.
- And this is the idea of the team: that one day IronCub3 can work in rescue operations.
- Ah, one last detail about it is this cuddly face.
- The story is as follows: the engineers decided to take a children’s robot designed for AI research to start work.
- As they did not exchange his face, we have a kind of mixture of iron man with baby reborn today.
Rescue operations
The ultimate goal of the experiment is to have humanoids capable of flying to a disaster/emergency place to perform air inspections or provide important data to remote teams.
He will also be able to land and walk, overcome obstacles, climb stairs, open doors, and so on.
Such a robot should be extremely useful for the Fire Department, for example, as you can send it to risky places, preserving the lives of your human employees. This would be valid for a building with risk of collapse or even a forest fire.
Something like this, however, should take a long time – see this almost a year interval for IronCub3 to get a small stable flight. Italian scientists, however, do not give signs that they will give up. Good thing, because this seems to be a promising project of a lot of public utility.
The information is from New Atlas.
