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Cockroach-Like Robot to Help Explain Animal Movement

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the on-all-sixes dept.

neutron_p writes "A cockroach-like robot named RHex is the starting point for a major project to understand animals' most distinguishing trait: how they move without falling over. Researchers from several universities will focus on RHex, a short, six-legged robot that scampers like a cockroach, as a working model of the principles they're seeking to uncover. By tweaking the robot and using it as a physical model, they hope to tease apart the complex neural and muscular networks in insects."

7 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. How long by Dorsai65 · · Score: 5, Funny

    before one of the humanoid robots tries to squish it?

    --
    --- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
  2. Practical Applications by ScArE2100 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This could have immediate application for the disabled. Imagine a personal moving device like the segway that walks around with technology derived from insects. It'd be pretty cool I'd say.

    Maybe a mars rover that doesn't faller over or get stuck

    There are lots of possible uses of data from this research.

  3. This is good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... for real cockroaches. When Armageddon comes, the cockroaches will have robot versions of themselves for slaves.

  4. Re:Easy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Already been done!

    The best way to study their movement is to mount railguns on them, and fire them at random, confusing the hell out of the little guys...don't believe me?

    http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/205/18/ 1803/i

    Check out the picture!

  5. Hannibal and Attila? by BrewerDude · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does anyone know how this differs from the insect-like robots (like Hannibal and Attilla) developed by Rod Brooks' group in the MIT AI Lab? It's been a while since I took his class, but I remember that they found that remarkably simple distributed control systems could be used to generate adaptive legged locomation patterns without requiring complex centralized control.

  6. Re:I work on this... by jwgoerlich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Adding a robust perception loop around the sense-response robot is the way to go, as far as I'm concerned."

    Agreed. In fact, that was one avenue the BEAM folks and Mark Tilden began exploring. Their take was to develop a solid sense-response sub-layer, and then layer on the computing systems.

    The BEAM name for the architecture was Horse-Rider.

    J Wolfgang Goerlich

  7. most important feature by kxmas · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will it flip on its back when runs out of batteries?