Festo bionic robots: spiders and octopuses in the factories of the future?

Festo booth at the US Trade Show 2014

Industrial robotics has made huge strides in its half century of existence. But the most perfect arms, legs, and wings are not yet invented by humans, but by nature. And if so, then instead of creating robots from scratch, is it not worth it to just copy animals?

The most famous manufacturer of bionic robots (i.e. those that mimic nature) is the company Festo. In general, she earns supplies of electronics, including self-developed servo drives. But since 2006 there has been a separate direction in the creation of bio-robots.
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Festo's bionic designs are part of the Bionic Learning Network consortium. It includes 12 institutes and universities, including the University of Stuttgart, the Technical University of Berlin and the Delft University of Technology, as well as major companies: Effekt-Technik GmbH, JNTec GbR, Sachs Engineering and others. But the main development team is Festo engineers, designers and biologists.

The company states that they create bio-bots for factories. There are already some viable examples. But these are not the biorobots that Festo has become famous for. Therefore, the main question is: does the company really develop business solutions or is it just PR?

Let's start with good examples.

1. Elephant and baby elephant

The invention of nature, which interested Festo engineers among the first, is the elephant's trunk: a manipulator that can work with objects of different weights and shapes, without damaging even very fragile ones, and has many degrees of flexibility. The development of Festo with the same characteristics was called the Bionic Handling Assistant . This is a super-flexible roboruka with soft "fingers" that securely and gently hold objects; its first prototype appeared in 2010.

The device partly copies the trunk externally: the covering of the flexible part of an elephant consists of skin folds, and that of the Bionic Handling Assistant is made of corrugated polymer. Trunk kinematics fully preserved: three segments and a flexible end grip.

The manipulator is used in collaborative robots, the projects and concepts of which are offered by Festo. One of them is Robotino . This small robot moves loads weighing up to 1.06 kg. In the design of Robotino used a mini-version of the Bionic Handling Assistant.

Robotino XT

Festo offers a full-sized “bionic trunk” at enterprises, in collaborative robots for production: it is a safe manipulator that allows people and machines to interact directly and literally transfer parts and tools “from hand to hand”.

2. Tentacle with suckers

Another industrial manipulator from Festo, OctopusGripper , is great for carrying smooth rounded parts. It is copied from an octopus and is an elastic tentacle with vacuum suckers. The tentacle, suction cups and the main body of the paddle are made of soft silicone.

The concept was developed in 2017, and now the company is testing the OctopusGripper on two pneumatic light robots of its own design - BionicMotionRobot and BionicCobot. Plus the “artificial tentacle” is in flexibility: it does not need to be individually tuned to each type of captured objects, it can manipulate cylindrical and round objects of different diameters.

BionicCobot c OctopusGripper

Looking at the OctopusGripper, it is clear that the engineers deliberately attached it a property with an octopus tentacle, although a different form might have given it more opportunities.

3. Chameleon language

More versatile manipulator - FlexShapeGripper , created in 2015. At its end is an elastic silicone cap that covers the subject and holds it. Under the pressure of the air from the inside, the cap expands and releases the "prey". The size and shape of the subject can be any.

This mechanism engineers "spied on" a chameleon, which captures with its tongue insects of various shapes. But here the imitation of nature turned out to be minimal: from the lizard here, only the shape of the cap, which resembles its language, and the principle of holding the object by it. The rest of the FlexShapeGripper looks like a normal industrial manipulator, albeit with a strange capture device.

The potential application of the FlexShapeGripper is manufacturing plants: it can move small and medium parts on assembly and packaging lines.

4. Spider Robot

Volumetric cocoons, which can build spiders and some species of caterpillars, became the prototype for 3D Cocooner . This is a device that creates a mesh form of polymer resin. The raw material is melted with the help of ultraviolet light, passes through the nozzles and forms a strong frame of a given shape. The first prototype was released in 2016; as Festo engineers suggest, in the future, technology can be improved and used for 3D printing of furniture.

3D Cocooner does not resemble a spider or a caterpillar, and only uses the same technology.

And now about the Fails

As part of the Bionic Learning Network, Festo is positioning itself as a concept developer, but not a manufacturer. The company is ready to sell its ideas to partners who will develop serial equipment based on them. As stated on the official website, “Festo supports its customers in the development of their products from the very beginning and accompanies them from market analysis to functional modeling”.

However, among the developments of Festo there are a lot of devices of dubious practical use. These are flying penguins, jellyfish floating in the air, controlled balloons with helium, a robot - a flying fox, a robot gull, a kangaroo robot. It is difficult to imagine them in industrial production, they cannot carry cargo and are suitable only for observation from the air. According to the authors of the concepts, these robots were created to test servo drives, study aerodynamics and control groups of flying objects. But the popularity of commercials with mechanical beasts tells us that this is to a large extent a PR move.