Snabbfakta
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- Villeneuve-d'Ascq
Ansök senast: 2024-06-07
PhD Position F/ M Eco-design of parallel deformable manipulators using plant-based materials
Contexte et atouts du poste
Context
This thesis is part of the French ANR project PEPR O2R (Flagship project named Organic Robotic, 37.5 Million Euros), more particularly the work-package “Softness and Sustainability” of the Structuring Action 1 (AS1) which questions the environmental impact of robotics and tries to find innovative solutions to lower it.
Objectives
With the current environmental crisis, there is a necessity to reduce the ecological impact of mechatronic systems, such as robotic manipulators. Indeed, these manipulators consist mostly of articulated arms composed of metallic rigid segments. The fabrication of these segments requires the extraction of metallic ore from the earth, energy to refine it in exploitable alloys, the emission of greenhouse gasses during their transport, and additional resources to shape the robot link. Fabricating the entirety of part of the links with wood reduces significantly the environmental footprint, as demonstrated in [1], [2]. However, this reduction is limited by the need to use enough wood material and energy to shape it and obtain the desired link rigidity, plant materials being intrinsically flexible. Moreover, the mechanical joints at the articulations still need to use metallic materials. In the Structuring Action 1 of the PEPR O2R project, instead of compensating for the plant material compliance, we propose to exploit it in the design of manipulators with soft and continuum robotics methodologies. The use of materials the least transformed possible, coupled with the absence of joints, will certainly lead to a strong decrease of the environmental footprint. In addition, we propose to investigate the use of parallel continuum structures, composed of several flexible legs controlling an end-effector platform, to reach a level of performance in terms of accuracy and payload for example compatible with applications like co-manipulating a load with an operator
In addition to contributing to answering a big challenge of our society today, and pursuing groundbreaking research in soft robot design by participating in a French Flagship project (PEPR O2R), the PhD candidate will have the opportunity to work with two research teams leaders in robot eco-design and soft robotics, the Armen Team, LS2N in Nantes and the Defrost Team, Inria, in Lille. They will also interact closely with an anthropologist working on evaluating the environmental footprint of robotic manipulators. The PhD student will mainly be based in Lille with several stays in Nantes, with a brut salary of 120k for the 3 years. They will work under the direct supervision of Dr. Sebastien Briot (CNRS, LS2N) and Quentin Peyron (Inria).
Mission confiée
The goal of this PhD is to conduct research on the following questions:
What raw (or transformed) plant-based materials can be suited for deformable manipulators?
How to model their sometimes complex mechanical behavior, with its dependency on external factors such as individual variability, humidity, temperature, and aging?
How to design a parallel deformable manipulator with robust behavior with respect to these variations of properties?
How to design and fabricate structures with raw plant-based materials ?
Principales activités
Main activities (5 maximum) :
Additional activities (3 maximum) :
Compétences
Technical skills:
Languages :
Relational skills :
Avantages
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