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Cockroaches: the Secret to Super-Agile Search-and-Rescue Robots?

Engineers at Johns Hopkins University are using the cockroach's skills of agility and balance to model the next generation of bio-inspired climbing, jumping robots. The researchers hope that their motion-control strategy will someday support search-and-rescue applications that require traversal on a variety of difficult terrains. Tech Briefs spoke with the engineers about their prototype cockroach bot .

Topics:
Automation Defense Motion Control Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [mysterious music] Sean Gart: People hate cockroaches because they're a little bit icky they touch you with their antenna, it's kind of gross but because they are so quick because they can climb so well that information can help you build a robot that is fast and can climb well. (Robot noise) Chen Li: That's exactly what we are looking for how they can go everywhere and move through almost any environment. (Researcher tapping roach) Gart: So to start with the study we took the

    00:00:28 cockroaches and we put them in a little test arena and they ran across the obstacle very quickly. Li: We studied them traversing both a large gap and large bump obstacle, and then we used high speed videos to observe how they interact with the obstacles to eventually traverse. What we found is that if they can run fast enough and if they have appropriate enough body pose, they would be able to pitch up and very quickly transition into dynamic climbing. Gart: So once we did the animal study, we moved to our robot study. Li: This REX Robot which we are using is basically modeled after cockroach so that it is dynamically stable. (Robot sounds) Gart: We ran it toward the same obstacles that the cockroaches crossed, and what we found was this pitching the body upward was pretty important.

    00:01:14 So we added what we call an active tail to the robot. So the tail swings back, the robot also pitches up. (Robot Sound) Li: Once we implement this new control strategy, the robot can actually traverse an obstacle that is about fifty percent greater than its body size. Gart: So the more we know about traversing these obstacles, the better robots will become in the future, so we have the cockroach to thank for these advancements in robotics. (Music ending)