Unmanned robotics laboratory is a new direction for future development

A group of researchers working in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab built an intelligent towing box (ITT) capable of performing fluid dynamics experiments and used it to perform 100,000 such experiments in just one year. The team described the capabilities of ITT and its work over the past year in a paper published in Scientific Robotics.

Intelligent traction box is a controller mounted on the bottom right of the cylinder and sensor on the main frame to perform various fluid movements). ITT took human-generated hypotheses and then performed sequential experiments to target a certain number of targets. Only pauses waiting for the level to calm down between the two experiments would be interrupted.


Unmanned robotics laboratory is a new direction for future development

An overview of the smart towing box, the main components include a 10 meter box, carriage, computer and motor controller.

When engineers design ships, they want the final vehicle to run in the water as efficiently as possible. This involves applied fluid dynamics research. But, as the MIT team's experiments have proven, robots have more to learn when they enter the lab.

One thing that shipbuilders have learned, for example, is that "vortex-induced vibration" must be modeled and observed. In practice, this involves moving the model in water and recording the vibrations that occur, and then using the data to repeatedly change the parameters for improvement. This process requires a lot of man-hours, but the robot can do these simple and repetitive things well.

In this new work, researchers report a way to mechanize the process by building various robots on water tanks, known as ITT. It can measure while running a model in a water tank, analyze the measurement results and construct and execute the next logical experiment. It repeats this operation until it reaches the required threshold.

Researchers report that in the past year, conducting such experiments has been very difficult, requiring about 100,000 experiments to be conceived and performed, and basically doing as much work as a PhD every two weeks. But the students in the laboratory need to do graduation design, and it is unrealistic to put all their time on it. Researchers claim that it has performed more "vortex-induced vibration" experiments than humans in the past year.

Unmanned robotics laboratory is a new direction for future development

Shows the sequential learning process of ITT

Unmanned robotics laboratory is a new direction for future development

(Graphical user interface of the controller, recording motion and force signals)

Researchers believe that ITT is a milestone in scientific experiments. It shows that robots can be used to perform many experiments that require a lot of repetition, and that experimental tests with no one controlling the sequence actually save countless man-hours.