Insect Robot Research
How to make the
insect climb walls
James Cameron created a Titanic-sized
stir when he invested in Planetary Resources Inc., an asteroid mining
operation co-chaired by personal spaceflight pioneers Peter Diamandis and
Eric Anderson. While Planetary Resources might have an abundance of money (the
company also counts Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt as investors) and
imagination, the actual technology to mine asteroids doesn’t exist… yet.
Enter the humble housefly. The reason
it can climb vertically is because it has tiny claw-like structures at the end
of its legs that grip irregularities in the wall that are too small for us to
see. The same principle could prove very useful for exploring small bodies in
space that are short on gravity.
“Crawling
around on an asteroid or comet is more like climbing than it is walking because
if you flip over, you fall off the asteroid and float away,” says Aaron Parness
of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The idea is to equip a robot with four
pairs of legs, each equipped with an “omni-directional anchoring mechanism.”
Think of it as a robotic version of an insect leg. Each one is equipped with
750 microspines, all with their own suspension structure so they can be dragged
across surfaces until their hooks snag tiny irregularities in a rocky surface.
The robot would walk by moving one leg
at a time while the other three are firmly set. The anchor is so strong that it
can withstand the force exerted by an attached drill, making the technology
perfect for obtaining core samples — both for NASA research purposes and to
search asteroids for valuable minerals that a company like Planetary Resources
might be interested in.
The technology could also help
scientists study Mars.
“Some of the most interesting sites
that we’ve seen from orbit have been the crater walls,” says Parness. “The
rovers that we have up there and the ones that we are sending right now, they
are not going to be able to access those kind of samples.”
Climbing rovers could also potentially
explore lava tubes, taking samples deep underground where radiation isn’t as
likely to have erased signs of past life. Not that the omni-directional
anchor’s usefulness is limited to space; Parness also hopes to help out
biologists in the Mojave Desert and Hawaii who need help collecting microbial
samples from caves that are too treacherous for them to climb down into
themselves.
Also interested in utilizing
microspines: hardcore rock climbers, who could use them to climb up cliffs like
Spiderman. Technically feasible, yes, but it’s unlikely the technology would
ever be cheap enough for recreational use. Another wild idea is to use the
anchors to tow small asteroids in between the Earth and the Moon, making it
easier for us to mine their minerals.
Sound a little too much like science
fiction? Parness has already built four legs and is just trying to figure out
how to coordinate them with JPL’s 17.6-pound Lemur lib robot. It might
take a while before it’s in space, let alone hauling asteroids through the
solar system, but a prototype could be climbing up a wall on Earth by as early
as this summer.
Accessed on 18th December 2012.
Robot Legs
While you won’t see this robot buzzing from building to building in your
city, you may witness it working to help rescue people and save lives. Built by
a group of researchers based at Osaka University in Japan, it was inspired by
the team’s observations of animals in nature. Borrowing from the body
structures of different animals, the group created a robot that is extremely
versatile in real world applications.
Developed specifically with
search-and-rescue operations in mind, the arachnid looking robot is
omni-directional and ignorant of the fact that it has two sides, so that if you
flip the robot over, it will simply reverse the position of its legs and keep
moving towards its destination. In addition, it has the ability to flatten its
legs out via four joints. When the robot is flattened, it has the ability to
fit through tight spaces using wheels that can be installed in the bottom of
each leg. With the recent earthquakes in Japan, a machine like this could be
handy to get supplies and camera equipment into survivors.
The possibilities for the use
of the robot are myriad. It could be used to help disarm bombs remotely,
allowing humans to keep a safe distance. Positioning cameras in hard to reach
places for events or surveillance is another use that comes to mind. The device
is smart enough that it can pick up objects using two legs and place them on
top of itself for transport. The team has even included touch sensors with some
versions of the machine to allow for more precise pickups. In addition,
the robot can also climb stairs by using two of its legs to pull itself up to
the level of a step. The rest of its appendages work to push the weight of the
robot up entirely.
There is no word yet as to when
the robot will be completed and ready for sale, but from the looks of the video
below it won’t be long.
Octopod robots
The design is quite smart and the possibilities of building upon this kind of design can prove to be useful for various applications such as space exploration, search and rescue missions, etc. The feature I'm particularly amazed about is its three degree of freedom legs. This enables the robot to simulate various gait patterns quite successfully.
If you find this robot interesting, please read the team's report on this robot atBen's site. You may find it interesting to explore Ben's site further. Among other useful things you can find other interesting robotics projects there.
There are also some robotics kits that feature eight-legged robots. Usually these kits aren't as advanced as the above mentioned robot, however, they do have eight legs. Also, I've seen people creating octopod robots using LEGO mindstorms series.
Centipede robots
As we can see from nature, centipedes
have a great level of trafficability. The count of legs as well as the length
to width ratio of a creature can be accounted for this ability. That's why
centipedes, along with other creatures, are researched and imitated.
Nevertheless, there are some problems
that make imitating a centipede a bit tough and possibly disadvantageous. You
guessed it - the number of legs. There are designs that use many motors - each
for a leg or each for a pair of legs. This has its pros and cons.
The pros are that this design can have
many sections that would enable it to be fairly flexible. The cons are the big
amount of motors needed that would really complicate the design. The other
method would be to use fewer motors and drive the legs using links and cranks.
The above mentioned method is used in
this centipede robot kit that you can see in the picture. The kit has two
motors that drive two links that are connected with cranks. Legs are connected
to the cranks which are positioned at different angles. Thus the wave motion is
formed.
This Mechamo Centipede kit is not very
cheap but it’s not very expensive too. In my opinion it’s a good value for
the money. You can get it for just above one hundred US dollars.
As you can understand, it cannot be
very flexible because of the linkage, so the trafficability advantage is absent
with this centipede robot design. However, if the body and the links could be
made of a flexible material it could be a very good design with many advantages
that centipedes created by nature has.
Octopods, centipedes and other robots
with more than six legs are a field where much research can still be done.
These robot designs can possibly turn out to be very useful for certain
applications where wheeled robots are inefective.
http://www.allonrobots.com/octopod.html, Accessed on 18th December 2012.
Avoidance system
How it works
We have
already done wall and obstacle detection using switches (the whiskers).
However, this can be problematic if you need to detect an obstacle at a
distance. This is where the ultrasonic sensor comes into play.
We
already know that the ultrasonic sensor can be used to detect objects and
measure the distance to them. By using an ultrasonic sensor we can program the
robot to avoid them at a variety of distances.
http://www.education.rec.ri.cmu.edu/content/electronics/boe/ultrasonic_sensor/4.html, Accessed on 18th Decemeber 2012.
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