at the ieee/rsj international conference on intelligent robots and systems, held from oct. 9-14 in daejeon, korea, researchers from the university of tokyo’s jsk lab demonstrated a new method for cooling their musculoskeletal, humanoid robot, kengoro. the robot “sweats” from its skeletal system to dissipate heat.

kengoro does push-ups. (youtube)

much like humans, who use sweating as a means for cooling their bodies through evaporation, kengoro has water that seeps out of its frame and onto its 108 motors to cool them. as an article on ieee spectrum noted, “the trick to this is how kengoro’s frame is constructed. it’s laser sintered from aluminum powder, which is an additive manufacturing technique that can print complex structures out of metal.”

the engineers used a laser-sintering process similar to 3-d printing to create varying areas of low and high permeability in the frame to create microchannels for the water to flow through and onto the components that need to be cooled.

“now that you’ve got aluminum bones that can transport water around your robot, the other trick (there’s definitely more than one trick here) is to get the robot to sweat in a useful way rather than just leaking water all over the floor,” continued the ieee spectrum report. “the laser sintering comes in handy here, too, by allowing the water to seep from an inner porous layer into a more porous region near the surface of the frame, from where it can evaporate out into the air.”

according to the report presented by the researchers, the cooling system worked three times better than air cooling and “significantly” better than circulating water through the frame. this allowed kogori to do push-ups for 11 minutes without ruining a motor.

read the full article from ieee spectrum at http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/this-robot-can-do-more-pushups-because-it-sweats.

watch kengoro in action in the video below: