From the same company who made a killing off the Rovio during the December holidays, Wowee has taken the name of this blog and created a product out of it!
Just kidding.
The moniker ‘bugbot’ has been used plenty of times before, I just did not know that the nickname had invented long ago by robotics engineers and other high-tech tinkerers.
Wowwee, a company aimed at making fun toys for grown-ups, is “a leading designer, developer, marketer and distributor of innovative hi-tech consumer robotic and entertainment products.” They’ve come out with their own answer to the hexbot; these little guys are also the same price (about 10 bucks) and will be available to the general public in the next months.
I love this little guy. I don’t know why. I guess because the biomimetics are still ‘old’ (as in, probably, a whopping three to six years ago in the development stages of this piece) and so his floppin’ legs are like a spastic puppy whipping its way through the terrain as if it had no cares in the world!
Tearing through underbrush, tumbling over railway tracks and sliding dusty hills, through rock-strewn canyons and troughs of mud, Boston Dynamics’ RHex robot is pretty amazing.
Stairs, falls, rocks or swimming pools do not stop the rugged RHex robot. When this creature starts running, the chances are you will, too: in the opposite direction!
A slab of technology graced by six whirling, curved arms, it’s operated by a remote control and has a range of up to 600 meters. Cameras on its front and rear ends, and an integrated GPS module, allow for use out of the line of sight or in tight areas.To check out the video, click this:
This adorable and available-in-many-colors little creature was designed by Nissan and could be seen at this year’s CEATEC convention (2008) biomimetic car by Nissan.
Busy as bees, Nissan is in the process of working on a crash prevention system that makes use of the type of technology that bees use in practicing crash avoidance. Research on bees and their navigation has provided some insight to Nissan engineers on how to design the next generation of sophisticated automotive technology.
Based on joint project with the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at Japan’s prestigious University of Tokyo, the Biomimetic Car Robot or BR23C is a robotic micro-car that mimics bee navigation with the goal of producing a system that prevents collisions altogether.
The underwater locomotion for this robotic ‘turtle’ is just so uncanny and amazing. Watch the video of this unit’s ability to bank on a curve, swim upside down and navigate in a straight line through the water:
Finnegan is the name given to this roboturtle which turns out to be quite an agile and aggressively maneuvering biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicle, propelled entirely with biologically inspired oscillating foils. The goal of biomimetic robotics is to observe, adapt and apply the design and behavior of biological examples (such as turtles!) to improve the performance of human-designed devices. Biomimetic propulsion and oscillating foils in particular, have been extensively studied as a possible means for improvement of underwater vehicle agility and maneuverability.
The objective of this particular project was to prove the ability of rolling and twisting foils to improve the maneuvering performance of underwater craft as defined by the turning radius and turning rate at speed, while simultaneously providing the agility to control six degrees of freedom at low speed in confined space.
In developing the roboturtle, the doctoral students at MIT took advantage of the growing body of knowledge into the dynamics of fish, bird, reptile and mammal swimming strategies to extend the state of the art in underwater vehicles. And the motion looks so real!
A real fish can accelerate at a rate of eight to twelve g’s – as fast as a NASA rocket. To scientists, the speed is difficult to explain (the question is known as Gray’s paradox). In an attempt to understand how the flap of thin fish tail can push a fish faster than a propeller, scientists are working on a biobot version of a pickerel (a species of pike fish) with a spring-wound fiberglass exoskeleton and a skin made of silicone rubber.
Movies and test runs of the robopike can be viewed here.
Studying the fluid dynamics of snail slime is the impetus behind the RoboSnail. Just like a real snail has sticky substance on its muscular underbelly which allows it to move in every direction on almost any surface (bark, brick walls, glass windows), the Snailbot is comprised of moveable segments that ripple on top of a thin layer of synthetic snail sludge to enable it to climb up walls and stick to ceilings.
The robotic snail consists of electronics on top of a rubber footing about six inches long by one inch wide. The robot glides over a thin film offake mucus made of silicon oil. Two versions were created to test mathematical simulations describing different forms of snail locomotion.
Snails can move over complex terrains and they are mechanically simple. They also not not have any exposed joints, so a machine based on this simple form and covered with rubber resistant to corrosion can navigate in chemically harsh environments.
Graduate students at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT brought snails to the lab and studied them with tools including a video camera. They determined that snails have three different modes of locomotion. For example, some travel over the mucus by undulating their bodies in tiny waves moving from the front of the animal to the back.
By pushing the fluid backwards, snails build up large pressures in the thin layer of mucus. The sum of all these pressures then project the snail forward,. The robotic version of the snail mimics this backward undulating movement.
The second form of motion is by undulating in the reverse direction, from back to front. The students constructed another robot using forward-undulating locomotion.
The third form of movement in a snail is akin to galloping. Like an inchworm, the snail sticks the front of its foot to a surface (thanks to suction and friction from the mucus), then draws the rest of its body up behind it. There are no plans yet to build another robot at this point in time to mimic this motion.
The team discovered that RoboSnail I performed well, traveling at a speed close to that predicted by the team’s mathematical models.
The SILO-6 is an autonomous walking machine intended for the detection and location of antipersonnel land mines. It has also been used as a testing machine for other organizations to use in their study of walking theory. The development of this biobiot was inspired by the locomotion techniques of mammals, arthropods and insects alike. As a matter of fact, the company names the different model set-ups as “insect config” or “pseudo-mammal config”.
This robot is being developed by engineers of the Department of Automatic Control at the Industrial Automation Institute, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and their site can be viewed by clicking here.
“Gordon” is a biobiot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter is removed from rat fetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, and then specialized nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across a five-by-five inch array of 60 electrodes. This “multi-electrode array” (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine. In the photo below, the person is holding the brain card containing the neruones that can then be ‘docked’ onto the robotic unit.
This groundbreaking experiment explores the ever-vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could provide revolutionary insight on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning.
Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading (one of the project’s principal researchers) says that the purpose of this robot is to figure out how memories are stored in biological brain tissue.
Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The most scary and fascinating thing about the experiments going on here is that from the very start of the work, the neurons are already active. Professor Warwick says that within a 24-hours period, the neurons already establish connections with the others by sending out feelers. Then, after about a week, there is evidence of spontaneous firings and brain-like activity, not unlike that in the human brain. And, without any stimulation at all from the research team, the ‘brain’ withers and dies within a couple of months
This project is by the people at the Department of Engineering Mechanics at the University of Duisburg in Germany. The whole thing began all the way back in 1992. The goal of creating this robot was, like most of the bot projects at the time, to achieve autonomous walking of a six-legged walking machine in uneven terrain.
According to the engineers, the task of walking seems to be no problem for most animals even ones described as “not intelligent”. From an engineering perspective, this task is very complex especially since moving with legs requires more technical effort than moving with wheels. So, the fundamental question always began with: why should legs be used?
Since the invention of the wheel, time and money has been spent to build and repair roadways. Wheeled vehicles have always depended upon even, congruous surfaces, which have to be prepared and maintained. Special wheeled vehicles like the bulldozer or other track vehicles had to be designed to create this pre-structure and then these had the distinct disadvantage of large energy consumption and collateral environmental damage. In deep forests and mountains, most wheeled vehicles are useless.
On foot, animals can reach nearly every portion of land on the planet. It therefore follows that it is a good idea to use the advantage of legged locomotion for machines. Before a machine can walk, many problems had to be solved such as the coordination of the joints and legs, adaption to the ground and intelligent behavior. The construction of Tarry II, the more powerful successor of Tarry, began in 1998. It had six legs with 18 actuators, which have to be controlled simultaneously.
A large amount of insect movement occurs without guidance from the insect’s brain. It is instead directed by circuits of nerves in the nerve cord, which extends from the head to the thorax and is equivalent to the spinal cord. If you decapitate a fly it will stop moving because the brain no longer provides the ‘go’ signal. But if you drop a neurotransmitter directly onto its thoracic nerve cord, then it will start to walk around. This bot is based on that research.
Link to the English-language section of their website.
Described on Gizmodo as ‘another graceful robot’, this autonomous swimming (and flying version) of a sea creature is probably one of the most beautiful and impressive bots I’ve seen so far! It’s aesthetic appeal is otherworldly and it is an inpsirational unit for any artist’s eyes! That is why I have to revisit this amazing machine!
The AquaJelly is an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive and an intelligent, adaptive mechanical system. AquaJelly consists of a translucent hemisphere and eight tentacles used for propulsion. At the center is a watertight, pressure vessel. The design is derived from the functional anatomy of a fish fin. It moves with the aid of a peristaltic propulsion system, or wave-like contractions, based on the reaction thrust principle used by real jellyfish.
The most amazing and progressive aspect of this device is the integrated communication mechanisms as a group-intelligence; many of the robots work together using Zigbee short-range radio on the surface and LED lighting when underwater.
Like the Roomba we have in our homes, AquaJelly is capable of independently controlling its own energy supply, by keeping in touch with its charging station. Whenever the AquaJelly comes to a charger located above the water level, it is sucked towards the station for a complete re-juicing.
