Rolling limbless robot hits new speeds | COSMOS magazine: "SYDNEY: Drawing inspiration from caterpillars that rapidly curl their bodies to roll away from predators, researchers have created a new soft-bodied robot that can travel faster than half-a-metre per second.
The 10-centimetre-long robot, called GoQBot, has a hammer-shaped head and a soft silicone body embedded with metal coils that contract like muscles when stimulated. This allows the flat crawler to reconfigure its body into a round 'Q' shape and quickly propel itself forward.
By simulating this novel escape behaviour known as ballistic rolling, the soft-bodied robot is faster and could be more usefully deployed in search and rescue-type operations on flat ground, said lead author Huai-Ti Lin, a biomechanical engineer from Tufts University near Boston."
Thursday, April 28, 2011
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