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.
Filed under: robot r&d | Tagged: insect nerves, insect robot, neurotransmitter, Tarry, Tarry II, walking robot
