Robot designed from cockroach example

Biomimetics
Robot learns acrobatic maneuvers Dash a cockroach
Cockroaches have developed an effective maneuver to quickly get out of sight: you swing to hang over an edge and underneath. U.S. scientists have taught a robot this acrobatic trick.

Cockroaches may, if they threaten to fall on a projecting edge hold, with their claws out, then swing around and land at the bottom with your legs up. If the insect is this - why, then U.S. scientists have asked him one of reproduced robots should not be able to? So they Dash taught the elegant change.

Robotic cockroach

Dash, an acronym for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, is a ten centimeters long and 16 gram robot made of cardboard. The six-legged, the Milli Biomimetic Systems Lab at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) was developed, modeled on a cockroach.
Video: Robot learns Dash of cockroach (0:41)
Thus Dash swing like a cockroach at the edge of a stone slab, can the researchers had to resort to a trick: Unlike the natural pattern Dash has no claws on its legs, allowing him to hold on to. The researchers therefore some velcro on the feet and on the edge and the underside of the slab are glued to simulate claws. But Dash was able to swing like the cockroach to the edge and then hang out with his feet up on the plate.

Cockroaches and geckos

The experiments conducted by researchers at the milli Biomimetic Systems Lab, along with colleagues from the Polypedal Lab at UC Berkeley to Robert Full. They had discovered the first to show that cockroaches can carry out this change. By chance, they discovered that geckos are in a camp - complete believed to also use many other small animals of this maneuver, since it is an efficient way to quickly make it invisible to pursuers. They turned to the scientists of the Milli Biomimetic Systems Lab to find out whether this movement can also be applied to robotics.
 Third
Cockroach, gecko and Dash: acrobatics in comparison : replaced Velcro claws.



The researchers have also developed the full order Tailbot, a moving robot with a tail that stabilizes the robot jumping over a jump in the air. Styled after the countryside. The researchers filmed a lizard with a high speed camera and so found out that this is balanced by movements of its tail in the air. This mechanism then after they built the Tailbot.
Insect under the plate

The fact that the cockroaches are able to have the change, the researchers recently discovered the Polypedal Lab. Actually, they had to watch how this feel with the help of their probe gaps and overcome them. When she made the gap wider, is the cockroach suddenly landed in the plate, says Jean-Michel Mongeau. "Was to the naked eye can not see what happened. But when we were filming with a high speed camera and so slowed the whole thing, we saw to our surprise, how firmly clutched the back leg of the cockroach on the surface and it thus allowed to to swing at the plate. "

Video: High Speed ​​DASH Hexapedal Robot (3:48)
The solution with the velcro, however, is only a makeshift. They were already in the process of developing claws after natural models for Dash, the scientists write in an essay in the open-access journal Plos One. The goal is to develop small, very agile robots by replicating nature that could be used for example to disasters as a search robot.