Nanyang Technological University Singapore Assistant Professor Pham Kwong Keung (right) and Eureka Robotics co-founder and CTO Dr Hong Fan (left) discuss the Dynamis technology they applied to the Denso Wave robot. Source: Nanyang Technological University
Eureka Robotics, a technology arm of NTU Singapore, has developed a technology called Dynamis that makes industrial robots more flexible, almost as sensitive as human hands, Can manipulate tiny glass lenses, electronics, or engine gears a few millimeters in size without damaging them.
The patented force feedback technology, developed by NTU scientists, has previously been demonstrated by an IKEA robot, which assembled an IKEA chair in just 20 minutes. The breakthrough, which was first published in Science in 2018, went viral online when it rivaled the dexterity with which a human can assemble furniture with their bare hands.
Pham Quang Cuong, an associate professor at NANYANG Technological University and co-founder of Eureka Robotics, said they had upgraded their software technology, Denso Wave, the market leader in industrial robots owned by Toyota Group, will supply the technology to a large number of industrial robots around the world.
Customers who buy the latest robots sold by Denso Wave can choose to use the new technology as part of a force controller that reads forces detected by force sensors on the robot's wrist and applies them accordingly: too little and things may not fit properly, too much and things may break.
Professor Fan of THE American Robotics Association said that mastering tactile sensitivity and flexibility like a human hand has long been a holy grail for roboticists because the programming of force controllers is so complex that it takes a long time to perfect the grip just for a specific task.
"Today, dynamics makes it easy for anyone to program touch-sensitive tasks normally performed by humans, such as assembly, good handling, polishing or sandblasting," explains Van Der Sven, who is also deputy director of nTU's Robotics Research Centre at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
"These tasks all have one common feature: the ability to make consistent contact with a surface. If our hands are deprived of touch sensitivity, for example when we are wearing thick gloves, we will find it difficult to assemble small Lego pieces, let alone small parts for a car engine or a mobile phone camera."
"Denso robots are the first choice for companies and universities with advanced initiatives in the field of robotics due to their high basic performance and openness," said Hiroasu Baba, Product Planning Manager, Denso Wave Robotics Division. Nanyang Technological University and Eureka Robotics are also using DENSO robots for this reason.
"As a result of that relationship, co-development naturally began and we were able to roll out the product smoothly. The technology that will be installed on the DENSO robot is a force-feedback technology that is becoming increasingly important in practical robot applications. Thanks to eureka robotics' development capabilities, the system is advanced and easy to use and light enough to be integrated into our standard robot controllers."
How does the new software work
The new software powered by Dynamis is called force-sensor Robust compliance control, and it only needs to set one parameter, the stiffness of the contact point, whether it is soft, medium or hard.
Despite its simplicity of setup, its performance already exceeds that of traditional robot controllers, which require a lot of expertise and time to fine-tune.
Dynamis is a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm developed by Assoc Prof Pham and his former PhD student, now Co-founder of Eureka Robotics and CTO Hung Pham, PhD.
This core technology was further refined and first used in eureka's custom robots like Archimedes, which can handle fragile optical lenses and mirrors with human-like dexterity, and is now used by multiple companies around the world.
The robots on the market today are either high precision but low flexibility (in car factories, for example, robots perform the same actions repeatedly) or low precision but high flexibility (in logistics, for example, moving packages of different sizes).
By deploying this technology, robotics engineers can now enable robots with high precision and high flexibility (ha ha) for large-scale industrial applications, paving the way for previously difficult or impossible implementations of handling and assembling delicate, fragile objects (such as optical lenses, electronic components, or engine gears).
Being equipped with force sensor robust compliance control capabilities, a large number of robots already operating in Denso Wave RC8 controllers only need to perform a simple software update from December 2021, while the new RC8 controllers will be packed with available software activation.
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