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Four Superb Robot Videos to Kick Off Your Week
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Last week was packed with robot videos. It was a
diverse bunch: Robot cheetahs jumping hurdles, an origami bot moved by
magnetic fields, another teaching itself to walk after losing a leg, and
an odd pair of cockroach- and bird-inspired bots.
Robotics is moving past the age of arms, long the
staple on factory floors. Researchers are working on widely varying
scales, imaginative modes of locomotion, novel materials, miniature
sensors, and machine learning.
Robot Cheetah Senses and Jumps Hurdles
We’ve written about MIT’s robot cheetah. It’s awesome—electrical, efficient, and pretty fast. And the robot is getting more athletic.
It can sense obstacles, calculate height and distance, and decide how
to jump over them. All this sensing and calculating notably happens
automatically onboard the robot. Watch the team test it on a treadmill
and in the gym.
Six-Legged Bot Learns to Walk Again
One of the coolest things happening in robotics is that robots are gaining the ability to learn by trial and error. Sorbonne University and University of Wyoming scientists have developed algorithms allowing
robots to learn how to overcome damage. After a few minutes’ of
experimentation the bots are able to function despite their impairment.
Jean Baptiste-Mouret, a lead researcher on the
project, says it's "a bit like a child who is trying many different
things with its own body, just to know itself." The research was
featured in a recent issue of the journal Nature.
Dissolvable Magnetic Origami Robot
This bot starts life as a flat sheet with an embedded
magnet. Expose it to heat, however, and it folds up, ready for action.
Manipulated by magnetic fields, the bot skitters across a surface or
goes swimming—work done, it dissolves in acetone.
It might be generous to call it a robot now, but by adding sensors and controllable self-folding functionality,
it can gain more autonomy. Future iterations may also dissolve in
water. The ultimate aim is operation inside the body—though presumably
it would be a smaller, biocompatible version. The MIT and TU Munich
robot was presented at ICRA 2015.
Zippy Cockroach Bot Launches Bird Bot
These UC Berkeley researchers
paired up their VelociRoACH robot—which for its size is one of the
fastest robots around—with their ornithopter robot (H2Bird). Why? The
former was used to launch the latter. Teamwork, eh?
It's hoped robotic teams like this could be used to maximize the system's overall utility.
If the legged bot runs up against a wall, it can
launch its friend over the top. Further, to date, flying robots have
fairly limited battery power and range—over rough terrain, the legged
bot can deliver the bird closer to its objective.
Image Credit: Haewon Park, Patrick Wensing, and Sangbae Kim/MIT
Discussion — One Response
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shin · 2 days agoOrigami/Self folding Robots seem like the wave of the future. Imagine having a whole book of pages, like a pop up book, but each page was a different kind of self assembling bot. Larger sheets of more durable materials could be shipped in stacks and self assemble to perform industrial or other tasks like search & rescue or land mine detection.Space ships could employ stacks of these bots on other planets and moons to set up assembly for stations. In Leo Earth Orbit the microgravity would likely require far less energy, and the flat plane surfaces could themselves double as solar panels to recharge flat batteries.
