The materials testing system at the Naval Research Lab, NRL66.3 has successfully completed the highest rates of fully-automated testing that has ever been achieved.
NRL66.3 6-DoF robotic material loader
The total number of tests that have been completed are 216; these were done at the rate of 26 / h exercising six degrees of freedom under multiaxiality conditions. The final design stage of the NRL66.3 built by the Computational Multiphysics Systems Lab ended on April 21, including the functional testing. The device is capable of providing all the data pertaining to the behaviour of the material required for classifying it into categories such as anisotropic, complex and composites.
Dr. John Michopoulos who heads the Computational Multiphysics Systems Lab explained that characterization of materials was important as the choice of materials has a major effect on the design of technologies used in marine and aerospace applications that require material composites offering high performance. The robotic loader is made up of six recursive instances of parallel linkages in the form of a hexapod configuration. It includes a stereoscopic machine vision that provides three-dimensional full-field remote displacement and strain measurements. The loader is also fitted with sensor subsystems that record the response of the materials being tested. Characteristics such as speed, efficiency, kinematic freedom etc are greatly enhanced in the loader when compared to similar machines that were developed at NRL earlier. The tests that were conducted in the loader were supported financially by the Office of Naval Research-International Field Office and ONR.
Source: http://www.nrl.navy.mil