| DASH, UC Berkeley's 10-centimeter long, 16-gram Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, has learned a new trick: the robot can now perform "rapid inversion" maneuvers, dashing up to a ledge and then swinging itself around to end up underneath the ledge and upside-down. This behavior replicates those of cockroaches and geckos, and may lead to a new generation of acrobatically-inclined insectobots. |
In addition to its lightning speed, quick maneuvers and ability to squeeze through the tiniest cracks, the cockroach also can flip under a ledge and disappear in the blink of an eye, the researchers found.
The insect does this by grabbing the edge with grappling hook-like claws on its back legs and swinging like a pendulum 180 degrees to land firmly underneath, upside down.
Always eager to mimic animal behaviors in robots, the researchers teamed up with UC Berkeley robotics experts to recreate the behavior in a six-legged robot by adding Velcro strips.
Disappearing cockroaches led UC Berkeley biologists to a clever stealth behavior that geckos also exhibit. The group teamed up with engineers to give their cockroach-inspired robot DASH similar capabilities.
The UC Berkeley team published the results of the study on Wednesday, June 6, in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE.
Graduate student Jean-Michel Mongeau of UC Berkeley’s biophysics group said he and his colleagues first noticed the roaches’ newly-identified behavior while studying how they use their antennae to sense and cross gaps.
“As we made the gap wider, they would end up on the underside of the ramp,” Mongeau said. “To the naked eye, it wasn’t clear what was happening, but when we filmed them with a high-speed camera and slowed it down, we were amazed to see that it was the cockroach’s hind legs grabbing the surface that allowed it to swing around under the ledge.”
“Cockroaches continue to surprise us,” said Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology who 15 years ago discovered that when cockroaches run rapidly, they rear up on their two hind legs like bipedal humans. “They have fast relay systems that allow them to dart away quickly in response to light or motion at speeds up to 50 body lengths per second, which is equivalent to a couple hundred miles per hour, if you scale up to the size of humans. This makes them incredibly good at escaping predators.”
Surprisingly, the researchers discovered a similar behavior in lizards, animals that have hook-like toenails, and also documented geckos using this escape technique in the jungle at the Wildlife Reserves near Singapore.
“This behavior is probably pretty widespread, because it is an effective way to quickly move out of sight for small animals,” Full said.
“All this must be put together into a complete package to understand what goes into these animals’ extraordinary maneuverability,” Full said.
Aside from helping scientists understand animal locomotion, these findings will go into making better robots.
“Today, some robots are good at running, some at climbing, but very few are good at both or transitioning from one behavior to the other,” he said. “That’s really the challenge now in robotics, to produce robots that can transition on complex surfaces and get into dangerous areas that first responders can’t get into.”
SOURCE IEEE Spectrum
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