Hexagonal Electrohydraulic (HEXEL) Modules for Rapidly Reconfigurable High-speed Robots

EuroEAP Society Challenge 2024
Project lead: Ellen Rumley, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Stuttgart, Germany)
Title: Hexagonal Electrohydraulic (HEXEL) Modules for Rapidly Reconfigurable High-speed Robots
Description: We present Hexagonal Electrohydraulic (HEXEL) modules which utilize a hybrid soft/rigid architecture for achieving high-speed (4,618 percent /second contractile strain rate), high-stroke (49 percent contraction), multi-modal actuation. HEXEL modules can be embedded with magnets along their exterior to form electrical and mechanical connections to neighboring modules for constructing reconfigurable robotics systems with multi-channel control, which we will show in our demonstrations.