'Caterpillar' Robot Wriggles to Get Around
Robotic innovations are helping scientists understand and combat environmental threats such as pollution and global warming. Robots are the future, as robots are used for gathering data, to conserving resources, and eliminating hazardous materials, robots will one day save the planet. The new robot inspired by a caterpillar, might one day climb trees to monitor the environment.
Traditional Robots:
Robots have in the past been made from rigid parts, which make robots susceptible to harm from bumps, scrapes, twists, and falls. Robots are restricted due to their rid and heavy parts, these restrictions keep robots from being able to wiggle their way past obstacles.
Robots have in the past been made from rigid parts, which make robots susceptible to harm from bumps, scrapes, twists, and falls. Robots are restricted due to their rid and heavy parts, these restrictions keep robots from being able to wiggle their way past obstacles.
As Scientist thought of the future of robots they came up with robots who are made up of soft body parts, that will improve the abilities of a robot. These "soft" robots will be more resistant to damage and can squirm past many of the obstacles the once impaired the hard robots. Scientist are building these soft robots out of bendable plastic and rubber parts that are inspired after boneless creature; for example octopuses, starfish, worms, and caterpillars.
"I believe that this kind of robot is very suitable for our living environment, since the softness of the body can guarantee our safety when we are interacting with the robots," said lead study author Takuya Umedachi, now a project lecturer in the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo.
The only problem with soft material is it deforms very easily thus making it difficult to control when conventional robotics techniques are used. Udemachi predicts to his colleagues that the soft a material must be monitored due to the unexpected ways in which such robots can move.
Umedachi and his colleagues need to figure out a better way to control the soft robots. They researched the caterpillars of the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta, hoping to learn how thee animals coordinate their motions without a hard skeleton. Caterpillars are extraordinary animals that are able to move in complex ways without having complex brains.
Caterpillars
Caterpillars are the perfect animal to base this new robot of off, for the reason that caterpillars do not rely on a control center like the brain to steer their bodies. Caterpillars have a very small number of neurons, Scientists have suggested that caterpillars control their own bodies in a more decentralized manner. This new robot is model after the caterpillar because there is a theory that sensory neurons are embedded in soft tissues that relay data to groups of muscles that can then help caterpillars move in a concerted manner. The new robot was inspired off the animals body, sensors were placed on the robot's soft body that can deform as it interacts with its environment. Scientists found out that the could use this sensory data to guide the robot's inching and crawling motion with very little guidance. Thus making a caterpillar the perfect inspiration for the future robots.
Gabriella Pedro
Mr. Gray
Honors Physics
January 11, 2017
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