Featured Image Credit: Christopher Goulet/ASU
Topics: Robotics, Technology
Anish Vij
Scientists have developed the world's first indoor-outdoor breathing, sweating, and walking robot.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the board meeting when a scientist bravely requests funds to build a 'sweaty robot' named ANDI.
To be fair to ANDI, he doesn't just sweat, he shivers too.
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“ANDI sweats, he generates heat, shivers, walks and breathes,” said Konrad Rykaczewski, principal investigator for the ASU research project.
The Arizona State University’s Tempe Campus project was funded by an NSF Major Research Instrumentation Grant, custom-built for ASU by the company Thermetrics.
ANDI can mimic the thermal functions of the human body and has 35 different surface areas that are all individually controlled with temperature sensors, heat flux sensors, and pores that produce sweat.
Rykaczewski explained: “There’s a lot of great work out there for extreme heat, but there’s also a lot missing.
“We’re trying to develop a very good understanding of how heat impacts the human body so we can quantitatively design things to address it.”
Around the world there are 10 ANDI manikins.
Most are surprisingly owned and used by athletic clothing companies for garment testing, however, ASU’s ANDI is only one of two used by research institutions.
It's the first thermal manikin in existence that can be used outdoors, enabled by a unique internal cooling channel.
ASU researchers basically want to gain a higher understanding of why heat stress on the human body takes place and what makes hot weather so deadly.
Jenni Vanos, associate professor in the School of Sustainability said: “You can’t put humans in dangerous extreme heat situations and test what would happen.
“But there are situations we know of in the Valley where people are dying of heat and we still don't fully understand what happened. ANDI can help us figure that out.”
This summer, researchers will pair ANDI with MaRTy, ASU’s biometeorological heat robot, to work together and better understand human sweating mechanisms
Ariane Middel, assistant professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering added: “MaRTy can tell us how the built environment modifies the amount of heat that hits the body, but MaRTy doesn't know what happens inside the body.
“MaRTy measures the environment, and then ANDI can then tell us how the body can react.”
“We can move different BMI models, different age characteristics and different medical conditions (into ANDI),” said Ankit Joshi, an ASU research scientist leading the modeling work and the lead operator of ANDI.
“A diabetes patient has different thermal regulation from a healthy person. So we can account for all this modification with our customized models.”