While researchers hope this robot won’t be crawling around your kitchen floor, they do think a new cockroach-inspired bot will be able to slip through tiny cracks to find people buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Dubbed “veloci-roach,” the crawling device uses sensors and locomotion like many other bio-inspired devices.
But this one flips on its side to shimmy through spaces that would normally prove too small, according to Chen Li, postdoctoral researcher in the UC Berkeley department of integrative biology, and electrical engineering and computer science.
“Our study is designed to try and understand how animals can go through a cluttered environment and see if we can take inspiration to improve the mobility of a robot,” said Li, lead author on the new paper published today in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
“It’s very challenging, because with search and rescue if you want to send a robot to find someone on building rubble, often the gaps are smaller than the robots themselves,” Li said. “The majority of the techniques to help robots navigate failed.”
The crawling robot is quite a bit bigger than a cockroach, about four inches long by two inches wide. They studied the locomotion of the discoid cockroach that scuttles along the floor of the South American rainforest.
The team studied how the animal can move so well. Members built a lab model using laser cutters to cut and assemble paper into pieces that mimic blades of grass. They also outfitted “veloci-roach” with a saucer-shaped back plate so it could turn on its side and use its legs to squeeze through spaces.
“Body shape is important here to determine locomotive performance,” Li said. “Just like the streamlined shape of an animal flying or swimming in fluid. We call it terradynamic streamlining, as opposed to aerodynamic steamlining.”
Mark Cutkosky, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University and an expert in small bio-inspired robots, likes this project.
“We have had small running robots for a number of years. However, while they can go quite fast on smooth surfaces, they perform poorly in comparison to small animals in rough or cluttered terrain,” Cutkosky said.
“Unlike mice, cockroaches don’t have advanced brains and, as the authors note, they rely substantially on passive mechanisms to ensure they can negotiate cluttered terrain without slowing down. So they are a good model for the current generation of small robots with limited computing power,” he said.
The next phase, Li said, is taking the crawling roach-bot out into the real world.
Dubbed “veloci-roach,” the crawling device uses sensors and locomotion like many other bio-inspired devices.
But this one flips on its side to shimmy through spaces that would normally prove too small, according to Chen Li, postdoctoral researcher in the UC Berkeley department of integrative biology, and electrical engineering and computer science.
“Our study is designed to try and understand how animals can go through a cluttered environment and see if we can take inspiration to improve the mobility of a robot,” said Li, lead author on the new paper published today in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
“It’s very challenging, because with search and rescue if you want to send a robot to find someone on building rubble, often the gaps are smaller than the robots themselves,” Li said. “The majority of the techniques to help robots navigate failed.”
The crawling robot is quite a bit bigger than a cockroach, about four inches long by two inches wide. They studied the locomotion of the discoid cockroach that scuttles along the floor of the South American rainforest.
The team studied how the animal can move so well. Members built a lab model using laser cutters to cut and assemble paper into pieces that mimic blades of grass. They also outfitted “veloci-roach” with a saucer-shaped back plate so it could turn on its side and use its legs to squeeze through spaces.
“Body shape is important here to determine locomotive performance,” Li said. “Just like the streamlined shape of an animal flying or swimming in fluid. We call it terradynamic streamlining, as opposed to aerodynamic steamlining.”
Mark Cutkosky, professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University and an expert in small bio-inspired robots, likes this project.
“We have had small running robots for a number of years. However, while they can go quite fast on smooth surfaces, they perform poorly in comparison to small animals in rough or cluttered terrain,” Cutkosky said.
“Unlike mice, cockroaches don’t have advanced brains and, as the authors note, they rely substantially on passive mechanisms to ensure they can negotiate cluttered terrain without slowing down. So they are a good model for the current generation of small robots with limited computing power,” he said.
The next phase, Li said, is taking the crawling roach-bot out into the real world.
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