RoboZoo: Wired’s Menagerie of Robot Animals:
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Furby, AIBO and Pleo might be fantastic robot pets, but can they carry hundreds of pounds, outrun a human or lead a school of fish? We think not.
Wired scoured the world's laboratories for the coolest and cutest animal robots.
An elastic, flexible robotic worm on wheels can inch its way through a simple set of obstacles.
Mechanical engineer Jordan Boyle modeled the 3-D-printed serpentine 'bot after Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most widely used animal models in neuroscience and genetics research.
RoboWorm can adapt to its environment, but it's not "powerful and robust enough to actually throw out there in the real world," Boyle said. It still lacks the mechanical and computational prowess to work in search-and-rescue missions, which Boyle hopes it will someday do. For now, the mechanical crawler can't burrow through rubble nor sense its surroundings -- both necessary capabilities for a rescue bot.
"It looks like it's detecting its environment and responding to it, but it's actually doing that solely on the basis of proprioception, or one's sense of body posture," Boyle said. That's cool, but not entirely useful for a rescue mission.
Pending funding, Boyle will start working a new prototype that might actually be able to help emergency responders.
Video and image: Jordan Boyle/University of Leeds.
<< Previous | Next >>
Furby, AIBO and Pleo might be fantastic robot pets, but can they carry hundreds of pounds, outrun a human or lead a school of fish? We think not.
Wired scoured the world's laboratories for the coolest and cutest animal robots.
RoboWorm
An elastic, flexible robotic worm on wheels can inch its way through a simple set of obstacles.
Mechanical engineer Jordan Boyle modeled the 3-D-printed serpentine 'bot after Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most widely used animal models in neuroscience and genetics research.
RoboWorm can adapt to its environment, but it's not "powerful and robust enough to actually throw out there in the real world," Boyle said. It still lacks the mechanical and computational prowess to work in search-and-rescue missions, which Boyle hopes it will someday do. For now, the mechanical crawler can't burrow through rubble nor sense its surroundings -- both necessary capabilities for a rescue bot.
"It looks like it's detecting its environment and responding to it, but it's actually doing that solely on the basis of proprioception, or one's sense of body posture," Boyle said. That's cool, but not entirely useful for a rescue mission.
Pending funding, Boyle will start working a new prototype that might actually be able to help emergency responders.
Video and image: Jordan Boyle/University of Leeds.
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