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- BYU engineers developed Baloo, a humanoid robot that can lift heavy objects.
- Baloo's flexible structure allows safe human collaboration, useful in construction and disaster relief.
- The project involved research on human-robot co-manipulation and virtual reality programming.
PROVO — Although the world might not ever have super soldiers like Captain America, engineers at BYU are building robots that could rival Steve Rogers' strength.
But strength isn't the only aim of this new robot. Just like Roz in the movie "The Wild Robot," who always completes a task, graduate student Curtis Johnson said he hopes to make robots that are helpful.
Johnson took that first step by building a prototype robot named Baloo.
Baloo can safely lift ladders, kayaks, car tires, chairs, heavy boxes and other large or unwieldy objects with his flexible structure.
Johnson built Baloo with mechanical engineer professor Marc Killpack in the BYU Robotics and Dynamics Lab. The robot is "revolutionary" because it "can interact with the world with its whole body," the university said in a release.
"What if the robot could push with its shoulder or push things out of the way with its whole body? That really expands its capabilities," aid Johnson, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.
Robots with exclusively hard components can "either break the robot or break you, whichever one is stronger," Johnson said. But soft robots like Baloo are filled with air to be "safer working companions."
Killpack collaborated with other professors on a research study that was foundational for creating a second robot prototype. The study looked at the physical human-human co-manipulation of heavy objects and translated the knowledge to work for human-robot action.
The second robot can "mirror" the actions of a human collaborator and is meant to be a partner to help humans carry large and bulky objects. It could be used in a variety of situations, from construction to disaster relief.
Study co-author Shaden Moss recently completed his master's thesis by programming a robot to follow an object that is co-manipulated by a person with a virtual reality headset.
"We used math to describe the tasks in virtual reality so the person can see it on the VR headset," Moss said. "They're the same every time, but the robot never knows that. All the robot knows is that it can feel the person start to pull on the table and so the robot will move in that direction."
Dallin Cordon, who also completed a master's thesis on robotics, used the same platform as Moss to develop a control system that mapped robotic motions in relation to a mobile base, enabling human-robot manipulation of a rigid object.
"No one has ever really done collaborative manipulation with a soft robot, so this is a novel approach," Cordon said. "I think the first moment when it worked, even if it didn't work well, was exciting because it finally did what we wanted it to do. That was electrifying."
Correction: A previous version incorrectly stated the robot was shown at CES in Las Vegas. It was not.
