New HAMR-E Robot Can Scurry Around Inside Jet Engines to Perform Maintenance
As you’d expect, jet engines are tremendously complex machines. Performing maintenance on them is extremely labor intensive, and even inspections can take a great deal of time. That’s why researchers from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a little robot called HAMR-E that can climb around inside of jet engines using electroadhesive foot pads.
According to Lindsay Brownell of Wyss Institute Communications, a single jet engine can contain up to 25,000 individual parts. That means that even regular maintenance can take over a month per engine. Ultimately, that translates to expensive flights. The tiny new HAMR-E robot is designed to alleviate that by making maintenance cheaper, easier, and faster.
The purpose of HAMR-E (Harvard Ambulatory Micro-Robot with Electroadhesion) is to crawl around inside of jet engines to perform non-invasive inspections that don’t require disassembly of the engine. It was developed in response to a challenge from Rolls-Royce, a company that still makes jet engines, who asked if it’d be possible to create an fleet of tiny robots that could be used to inspect the interior of those engines.
To accomplish that, the Harvard researchers adapted their existing HAMR micro-robot design. They added electroadhesive foot pads and special ankle joints, which let HAMR-E cling to metal inside of jet engines. With those special feet, HAMR-E can walk up walls and even upside down. A unique three-points-of-contact gait keeps it secure as it does. Those developments allow HAMR-E to quickly perform inspections that would take humans a great deal of time to carry out.
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