Robotics Gone Wild: 8 Animal-Inspired Machines
If you want a glimpse of the future of robotics, start by looking at our biological past and present. Here are eight robots that borrow aspects of animal physiology, which has been honed through eons of Darwinian user testing.
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Among programmers, there's a principle called DRY, which stands for "Don't repeat yourself." It's an attempt to avoid writing code that duplicates the function of other code.
DRY embodies the same resistance to needless repetition as the more common idiom, "Don't reinvent the wheel."
Among those making robots, a group that includes software and hardware engineers attempts to adhere to these principles, as can be seen in designs that borrow from nature, from the evolved forms of life on Earth.
Biomimicry and bioinspired design provide a way to avoid reinventing the wheel. The biological systems of living things have been honed through eons of Darwinian user testing.
Borrowing aspects of animal physiology isn't the only option or necessarily the best option for robot designers. For some purposes, something new may be necessary. For others, biomechanically systems can't be easily duplicated.
As MIT's Biomimetic Robot Lab notes on its website, "The complexity of the foot structure with its neuromuscular control" isn't easily duplicated with current technology.
Modelling artificial systems after natural ones can be a shortcut to mechanisms that work well enough. So popular is this approach that it has its own journal, Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Among the robots discussed therein is the GoQBot, modelled after a caterpillar that can form its body into a wheel when it needs to roll.
Why reinvent the wheel when you can simply be the wheel?
Matthew Travers, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, in a phone interview said bioinspired and biomimetic systems have their place. "It's a good approach," he said. "Ultimately, there's a lot of variability in terms of approaches."
In the lab where Travers works, the focus is mobility and biological systems have a lot to offer there. "As far as mobility is concerned, bioinspiration is an obvious route to cake," he said.
Asked where nature might not be the best guide for engineering, Travers recounted remarks made by UC Berkeley professor Bob Full, director of the Poly-PEDAL Laboratory and Center for interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research (CiBER), as well as the editor-in-chief of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
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Full, in an email, said Travers had captured the spirit of what he'd said but offered a more complete quote: "We should not blindly copy Nature. We must translate the principles and analogies from Nature that are advantageous, and integrate them with best human engineering to design something better than Nature. The largest bird's wingspan was about 30 feet, so I couldn't fly here on it. Planes go far beyond Nature's abilities."
"Our building blocks as engineers are fundamentally different that those of nature," said Travers.
In Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired By Nature (William Morrow, 1997), Janine Benyus wrote, "Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based on not what we can extract from nature, but what we can learn from her." By copying nature's designs, she observes, we have solar cells inspired by leaves, perennial grains inspired by tallgrass, and durable ceramics inspired by mother-of-pearl.
Nature still has much to teach us as we strive to improve on its designs. For roboticists, George Santayana's famous admonition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," should be rephrased, "Those who study the past have the privilege to borrow from it."
Here are a few of the many biologically-inspired robots that have been developed in recent years. And there are many more to come.
Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute borrowed from the design of the stingray to create living machine -- a robot ray propelled by muscle cells derived from a rat's heart. The ray goes beyond biomimicry. It qualifies as a cyborg, a combination of biological and mechanical systems.
Kevin Kit Parker, professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard's Wyss Institute, told InformationWeek in an email that while some of colleagues are focused on advancing soft tissue robotics, he's more interested in how the work might help improve human health -- specifically by advancing artificial heart technology. The implication of engineering a reliable artificial heart using living cells could pave the way for an artificial heart that works more effectively than existing options inside a human body.
(Image courtesy of Sung-Jin Park, Karaghen Hudson, and Michael Rosnach)
Developed by professor Mark Cutkosky and colleagues at Stanford University, StickyBot III is the latest iteration of the original StickyBot from 2006. The robot was created to explore directional dry adhesion that mimics the gecko's adhesive foot pads. The geometry of the surface of the artificial pads gives the robot the ability to adhere to glass, painted metal, or polished granite, among other surfaces. Yet its pads are not sticky to the touch.
An ornithopter is a machine designed to fly by flapping its wings. Ronald Fearing, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, and colleagues Cameron J. Rose and Parsa Mahmoudieh developed an ornithopter that can be launched from the back of a robotic roach.
Small robotic flyers have limited battery life, so the researchers say they believe a cooperative arrangement with legged, crawling robots can make applications like exploring rough terrain more viable.
Designed by Bong-Huan Jun and colleagues at the Korea Research Institute of Ship and Ocean Engineering (KRISO), Crabster is an underwater robot designed to assist with salvage and rescue operations. Its crab-like structure and locomotion help it remain stable in strong underwater currents.
Being able to walk like a human has huge advantages for robots in environments tailored for humans.
The humanoid robot DURUS debuted in 2015 at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Endurance Test to demonstrate walking behavior. Developed by SRI International, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers Jacob Reher, Ayonga Hereid, Christian M. Hubicki, and Aaron D. Ames, and Eric A. Cousineau of Mathworks, DURUS may be state-of-the-art, but the toddler in the foreground can run circles around it. As the researchers note in a recent paper, "Achieving Dynamic Walking on Humanoids Is Hard."
The cheetah is the fastest land animal and Boston Dynamics' Cheetah robot is, the company claims, the fastest quadruped robot in the world. Just be glad these things aren't used for security or police operations. Seeing the Cheetah galloping along a treadmill is disturbing enough.
Funded by DARPA's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation program, the Cheetah robot could pave the way for agile, fast robots for military and other applications.
Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, Clemson, and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis developed a robot modeled after a mudskipper to explore how a tail, in conjunction with fins or limbs, may have allowed early vertebrates to make the transition from sea to land. Daniel Goldman, associate professor at the Georgia Tech School of Physics, served as lead author of the paper in Science described the work, which has the potential to help robots move more efficiently on sand and loose dirt.
Robots used for search and rescue provide another example of borrowing from nature while going beyond it. Matthew Travers, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, said robots in CMU's Robotics Institute like the robot snake are designed to be used with tethers, to provide robust connectivity, ongoing power, and recoverability. He noted that the robot snake has been designed to climb poles by rotating its body, a method of climbing not practiced by real snakes.
Robots used for search and rescue provide another example of borrowing from nature while going beyond it. Matthew Travers, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, said robots in CMU's Robotics Institute like the robot snake are designed to be used with tethers, to provide robust connectivity, ongoing power, and recoverability. He noted that the robot snake has been designed to climb poles by rotating its body, a method of climbing not practiced by real snakes.
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