Scurrying Roaches Help Researchers Steady Staggering Robots
Summary
Now, researchers have leveraged the bug’s superb scurrying skills to create a cleverly simple method to assess and improve locomotion in robots. But in a new study, biomechanics researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology boiled down the sprints of cockroaches to handy principles and equations they then used to make a test robot amble about better. The mechanical robot, a consumer model, had four stubby legs and no nervous system but relied instead for locomotion control on coarse physical forces traveling through its chassis as crude signals to roughly coordinate its clunky gait. Bumps as high as its hips wouldn’t slow it down at all,” said Izaak Neveln, the study’s first author, who was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Simon Sponberg at Georgia Techduring the study. We were able to predict the changes this would make by using the measure we developed from the cockroach.” The researchers also wired up specific roach muscles and neurons to observe their syncopations with the scurry waves.