Researchers build miniature flying robots, modeled on Drosophila

Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon

It's relatively easy to get something big and heavy to fly. With enough equipment, it's possible to load the object with lots of energy to power the flight, specialized parts to control it, and the computers (or people) needed to direct the flight. But things get challenging as you make things smaller, and it gets harder to squeeze all the requisite parts into an ever-shrinking space. In that, nature has us beat, since something like a fruit fly crams all the energy, control systems, and specialized hardware into an extremely compact form.

We may not be at fruit fly level yet, but researchers are giving the insects some competition. Today's issue of Science reports on miniature flying robots that aren't much bigger than a coin. The power and control are handled externally, but the tiny robots can still perform basic maneuvers, and they have enough lift to spare that they could fly under their own power for a few minutes if the right power storage were developed.

The authors are all from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, and they clearly find insects inspirational, noting that, despite their simple nervous systems, "flying insects are able to perform sophisticated aerodynamic feats such as deftly avoiding a striking hand." So they set out to build their own.

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Robotics forecast: cool with a chance of lost humanity

You might expect a book titled Robot Futures and written by a robotics researcher to be a whiz-bang prophecy of technologies that are the best thing since sliced bread. Soon we’ll be living to 200 while traveling from vacation to vacation in our flying cars while robots handle all the parts of our jobs that we hated anyway, right? Maybe, but this book isn't the place to find it. There’s plenty of speculation in it (I mean, we are talking about the future here) but it’s decidedly more pragmatic and sober than that.

The book’s author, Illah Nourbakhsh, runs the Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University which “explores socially meaningful innovation and deployment of robotic technologies.” (He’s also one of the developers of the GigaPan imaging tools we highlighted recently.) The book, accompanied by Nourbakhsh’s blog of the same name, focuses on what he calls the “human side effects” of future technologies—the unexpected ways they could affect us socially and as a society.

Each chapter of the book—which progresses from the likely-seeming near future to an increasingly speculative and distant one— begins with a short, fictional story that illustrates the type of issues that could accompany a given technology. The rest of the chapter then beaks down those issues.

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Moon rocket engines recovered from bottom of Atlantic ocean

A year ago, Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos blogged on his Bezos Expeditions venture fund site that an undersea exploration (financed and directed by Bezos himself) had located some of the enormous F-1 rocket engines used by Apollo 11. The engines were about 14,000 feet (about 4,270 meters) below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida and had been there ever since July 16, 1969, when they'd been lit for about 150 seconds to propel Apollo 11's Saturn V launch vehicle off the launch pad and to the Moon.

Bezos' intent was to recover one or more of the engines for display, and this morning he is reporting success: after more than 40 years resting on the seabed, components from several F-1 engines have been raised back to the surface.

A crewman sprays water over a recovered injector plate. Clearly visible are the holes through which 1 ton of RP-1 fuel and 2 tons of liquid oxygen was forced... per second.

Bezos Expeditions

Contrary to Bezos' original note, it's currently impossible to determine exactly which flights the engines came from. It's possible they are indeed from Apollo 11's S-IC stage, but the Bezos Expedition site notes that "many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult." Every F-1 engine flown was hand-built and manually assembled, and each major component of an F-1 engine had some form of serial number on it in order to track it through the manufacturing process. If the serial numbers on the recovered components can be deciphered, it will then be a simple matter to determine which Apollo flights they came from.

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Moth pilots robot to a (faux) booty call

The white ball the moth is standing on acts as a trackball, and its input is used to direct the robot.

From Ando, et. al.

It could be a scene from a B-rated horror flick or a ridiculous kids' comedy: a bug-eyed moth deftly pilots a robotic vehicle, zig-zagging back and forth to seek out its target, a sweet-smelling lady moth. But this isn’t fiction; this bizarre scene actually happened in the laboratory of three Japanese researchers from the University of Tokyo. Their research is published in this week's issue of Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

The goal wasn’t entertainment, although it was a likely byproduct. Instead, the researchers are interested in biologically-inspired robots that can recognize and seek out odors, such as a gas leak or a chemical spill.

For this type of sensory processing, nature is an excellent place to turn for inspiration, since tracking down odors is a key aspect of survival for many species. Plants and animals have evolved in response to all sorts of ecological problems, and adaptations found in the natural world have been very helpful in advancing technology of all kinds (see here and here for previous Ars coverage of biologically-inspired technology).

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DARPA’s next "grand challenge": tool-wielding rescue robots

SCHAFT's planned entry into DARPA's Grand Robotics Challenge.

Yesterday, the Department of Defense's advanced research arm, DARPA, announced the details of its next grand challenge. Following up on its autonomous vehicle challenge, the research agency will now focus on robots that do need an operator. But these robots are meant to operate in what DARPA calls "degraded" environments—basically, disaster zones of various flavors—where bandwidth between the operator and the robot won't be guaranteed.

DARPA's Dr. Gill Pratt, who described the program earlier this week, said the goal of the grand challenge was to help the DOD fulfill one of its 10 mission roles—the ability to provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief. But the agency's thinking was clearly influenced by the Fukushima disaster. "During the first 24 hours [of Fukushima], there were several opportunities for intervention to help make the disaster less severe," Pratt said, "but unfortunately, people could not go in to that zone because the radiation was too high, and as a result, the disaster was worse than it could have been."

The DARPA robots therefore must operate in what Gill termed an "engineered" environment, "not a random, unstructured outdoor environment." Such an environment is likely to include tools, so the robot will be expected to navigate doors and stairways and use everything from screwdrivers to vehicles. Again using Fukushima as a point of reference, Gill mentioned that fire trucks were used in high-radiation areas at the site, a task that could have been handled more safely and thoroughly if humans weren't involved.

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Flexible robots, in (not quite) living color

S. Morin, Harvard

Last year, we covered a radically different approach to robotics. Instead of the hard, mechanical skeletons that are features of most robots, a team was inspired by squid, and built a soft, flexible robot that literally ran on air. By pumping different segments of their robot full of air using a set of pre-programmed commands, the rubbery creation could flex its legs and stride across surfaces, slipping neatly under barriers when needed.

But, if the researchers were inspired by cephalopods like the octopus and cuttlefish, then they seemed to also have been a bit jealous of one of these creatures' other abilities: rapidly changing color to match their surroundings or make a warning display. So, the team is back with a modified version of their previous robot—one that can change color on demand.

The method for doing this was a straightforward variation on the technique used to propel the robot: an external compressor was used to pump material into the robot from an external reservoir. Instead of air, however, the material was a fluid that contained a variety of dyes or fluorescent molecules that gave the robot some color.

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DARPA’s "Cheetah" robot sets new speed record of 18mph on treadmill

Biologically inspired designs are not a new thing in robotics, but the video embedded below is the first time I've ever seen something that looks like it's modeled on a family pet. Development of the Cheetah robot is being funded by DARPA, the US's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The folks at DARPA have been seing an increased military reliance on robots for disarming and disposing of explosives, so they've set about funding programs to improve the perforance of this hardware.

Cheetah, built by Boston Dynamics, is an attempt to add some speed to robots with legs (wheeled robots can already go pretty fast). It's somewhat disorienting to watch, because it appears to be running backwards—the legs are flexed in the opposite direction from the one most animals travel, and a bit of hardware that looks like a head is actually in the rear. But one key development is actually in the robot's body, which is able to flex as part of the stride. The end result is a top speed of about 18 miles an hour, nearly a third faster than the previous record for a robot on legs.

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Aerial robots swarm the stage at TED [video]

Long Beach, California—Vijay Kumar's videos have already been a hit on YouTube, as people have been fascinated to watch swarms of robotic quadrotors perform various feats, like flying through narrow windows and coasting across a room in formation. But Kumar still had a few tricks up his sleeve when he took the stage at TED, and he seized the opportunity to show some serious ways in which aerial robots will change our world.

Some could say that aerial robots are already making a huge impact, primarily in military applications where (very) remote humans often pilot drones in hostile territories.

Kumar, however, envisions aerial robots that can fly themselves and carry out their tasks, on their own, or with minimal human input beyond initial design and programming. His drones offload even more of the job of stabilizing their flight to computers that aren't even on-board the copter (a weight and complexity advantage). Once airborne, the entire flight is computer-controlled.

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Robot without a skeleton inspired by squid, crawls on land

The design of many robots has been inspired by living creatures, from the humanoid machines that have appeared in science fiction for decades to the mechanical cockroaches that scurry around some research labs. There has even been a robotic tuna used to explore the ocean. But our reliance on the mechanical has left a very large area of the animal kingdom left out: soft bodied creatures with neither skeletons nor shells. In a paper that will be released by PNAS, researchers describe a soft-bodied robot that can crawl around lab, powered by compressed air.

The limits in robot design have been very practical. We don't yet have something that will mimic muscles well, which leaves our creations articulating their joints with things like gears and engines, which require a fairly rigid support structure. But the creators of this new robot were inspired by squid, which perform impressive feats of flexibility using a soft body that's supported by the ocean's buoyancy.

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