ROBOTICS – SOFT ROBOTS
Alvo Aabloo:
Soft robots may save lives someday in the future Robotics is professor Alvo Aabloo’s passion. Soft robots in particular may soon bring major changes in quite a few areas – particularly in medicine.
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he University of Tartu has around 40 people working with robots, approximately 10 are working in the soft robotics field. In the beginning, Aabloo worked in the underwater robots field alongside fellow EXCITE top researcher Maarja Kruusmaa. However, Aabloo states that the soft robots field is moving increasingly towards medicine and nature. This work involves materials, management, control and also construction of robots. Aabloo says they are among the best in their field. The global experts in this field all know each other and attentively observe each other’s work and activities. “We are not unique, there are quite a lot of people experimenting with this,” he explains. “We combine various materials and we
Estonian Centre of Excellence in ICT Research
have few unique materials that we are attempting to combine with existing conductive polymers.” He highlights that the developments in the field nowadays are primarily based on materials – the materials are not as good as researchers would like them to be. However, a lot of effort is put into attempting to develop them so they can keep up with the field of so-called real robots. Aabloo states that the latter are even faster and more effective now. “However, we have special applications into which we are unable to send these iron men,” he says. “I mean both nature and medicine. We prioritise non-invasive surgery and our creations can be well implemented in that area.” As a consequence, they need to consider issues like biocompatibility as well. If the robots
are created by researchers to go inside a person and stay there, the materials they’re made of cannot be toxic. Normally, they tend to be.
Aabloo’s path to this field Alvo Aabloo used to work in the field of polymer batteries, until he happened to read a story about people working in the exciting field of soft robots. He understood while reading that story that there were a lot of similarities between what he was doing and what he was reading about. In the case of batteries and supercapacitors, maximum energy efficiency is what people are looking for, but in the case of soft robots it is mobility. The materials are quite similar. The optimisation just has a different objective. “The topic seemed both familiar and original, and it felt like something that could interest people,” he said. “After all, it is a device inspired by biology. Another turning of the gear-
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