The ocean and human activities related to the sea are under increasing pressure due to climate change, widespread pollution, and growth of the offshore energy sector. Data, in under-sampled regions of the ocean and in the offshore patches where the industrial expansion is taking place, are fundamental to manage successfully a sustainable development and to mitigate climate change. Existing technology cannot cope with the vast and harsh environments that need monitoring and sampling the most. The limiting factors are, among others, the spatial scales of the physical domain, the high pressure, and the strong hydrodynamic perturbations, which require vehicles with a combination of persistent autonomy, augmented efficiency, extreme robustness, and advanced control. In light of the most recent developments in soft robotics technologies, we propose that the use of soft robots may aid in addressing the challenges posed by abyssal and wave-dominated environments. Nevertheless, soft robots also allow for fast and low-cost manufacturing, presenting a new potential problem: marine pollution from ubiquitous soft sampling devices. In this study, the technological and scientific gaps are widely discussed, as they represent the driving factors for the development of soft robotics. Offshore industry supports increasing energy demand and the employment of robots on marine assets is growing. Such expansion needs to be sustained by the knowledge of the oceanic environment, where large remote areas are yet to be explored and adequately sampled. We offer our perspective on the development of sustainable soft systems, indicating the characteristics of the existing soft robots that promote underwater maneuverability, locomotion, and sampling. This perspective encourages an interdisciplinary approach to the design of aquatic soft robots and invites a discussion about the industrial and oceanographic needs that call for their application.
The ignition of flammable liquids and gases in offshore oil and gas environments is a major risk and can cause loss of life, serious injury, and significant damage to infrastructure. Power supplies that are used to provide regulated voltages to drive motors, relays, and power electronic controls can produce heat and cause sparks. As a result, the European Union requires ATEX certification on electrical equipment to ensure safety in such extreme environments. Implementing designs that meet this standard is time-consuming and adds to the cost of operations. Soft robots are often made with soft materials and can be actuated pneumatically, without electronics, making these systems inherently compliant with this directive. In this paper, we aim to increase the capability of new soft robotic systems moving from a one-to-one control-actuator architecture and implementing an electronics-free control system. We have developed a robot that demonstrates locomotion and gripping using three-pneumatic lines: a vacuum power line, a control input, and a clock line. We have followed the design principles of digital electronics and demonstrated an integrated fluidic circuit with eleven, fully integrated fluidic switches and six actuators. We have realized the basic building blocks of logical operation into combinational logic and memory using our fluidic switches to create a two-state automata machine. This system expands on the state of the art increasing the complexity over existing soft systems with integrated control. Figure 1. An integrated and logically controlled soft robot. (a) The soft robot controls six actuators connected to the legs, colored orange and blue. The controller circuit is designed to engage the orange actuators and the blue actuator sequentially. (b) The fluidic architecture shows a JK flip-flop. The circuit has three inputs including a vacuum power line, a clock line, and a control input, with six outputs to vacuum actuators from Q and Q ̅ .
Operations in extreme and hostile environments, such as offshore oil and gas production, nuclear decommissioning, nuclear facility maintenance, deep mining, space exploration, and subsea applications, require the execution of sophisticated tasks. In nuclear environments, robotic systems have advanced significantly over the past years but still suffer from task failures caused by informational and physical uncertainty of the highly unstructured nature of the environment and exasperated by the time constraints imposed by high radiation levels. Herein, a survey is presented of current robotic systems that can operate in such extreme environments and offer a novel approach to solving the challenges they impose, encapsulated by the mission statement of providing structure in unstructured environments and exemplified by a new self‐assembling modular robotic system, the Connect‐R.
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