Robotics goes Green: the “Department of Excellence” project

It is estimated that industrial robotics devices have increased by about 16% annually since 2010, with 60% of industries expected to employ them by 2025. Data from the International Energy Agency is clear: the sector is expanding rapidly. However, viewing robots as rigid machines limited to production contexts is outdated. Today, robotics applications range from rehabilitation to precision agriculture, from assisting vulnerable individuals to handling delicate items.

This evolution has given rise to fields like soft robotics, which focuses on developing robots equipped with flexible limbs and interfaces, suitable for interacting with living beings. There’s also wearable robotics, based on wearable systems (such as exoskeletons and smart clothing) capable of measuring physiological parameters and interacting with the wearer.

Robots are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, resembling and drawing inspiration from living beings. In this way, they contribute to society’s social, environmental, and energy development goals and must therefore be sustainable.

The Department of Industrial Engineering has embraced this premise, developing a multidisciplinary project that earned it the recognition as a Department of Excellence for 2023-2027.

What Sustainable Robotics Means

The team of professors and researchers at DII, with Matteo Benedetti as Research Delegate and Giacomo Moretti as a Member of the Steering Committee, is working to explore different aspects of sustainability in robotics. These include:

• Social Aspects: Developing biomedical robots, wearable systems for rehabilitation, or assisting patients with motor disorders, and smart clothing capable of monitoring physiological parameters or transmitting stimuli to help wearers perform daily functions.
• Environmental Aspects: Creating “green” materials that are biodegradable or derived from recycling processes and applications aimed at the “robotics for sustainability” paradigm, such as environmental monitoring or disaster response in extreme events.
• Energy Aspects: Enhancing robots’ energy efficiency through low-consumption control and movement systems, improving their autonomy with energy-recovery devices from renewable sources or, for wearable systems, from the user’s own movements.

Project Phases

The research will develop on three levels, leading to increasingly complex sustainable robotic components and systems.

1. Enabling Technologies: Laying the foundation of future robotic systems, focusing on new active materials that can deform in response to electrical or thermal stimuli, and printed electronics that enable communication circuits and devices to be directly applied to fabrics or structural components.
2. Subsystems and Components: Developing the functional abilities of robots, such as sensors that represent the robots’ “skin” and “eyes” and actuators that function as their “muscles.”
3. Integrated Complex Systems: Assembling these components into complex systems — actual robots, or close to it. Prototyping will focus on creating soft robots powered by high-efficiency artificial muscles, crafted from flexible, smart materials, and smart garments — active clothing equipped with sensors and actuators to support users in their activities.