Robots: Jumping and Crawling in Millirobots

Posted 4 Nov 2008 at 13:59 UTC by mwaibel

Anyone who has studied insects knows why they are such a great source of inspiration for roboticists: They are a treasure trove of extremely diverse and surprisingly simple and robust solutions to complex tasks highly relevant to robotics, including locomotion, navigation and sensing. Insects consistently outperform today's robots in all complex real-world tasks and do so using a minimum of hardware and energy. The latest episode of Robots talks to Sarah Bergbreiter from the University of Maryland, who looks at methods to manufacture insect-sized robots. We then talk to Aaron Hoover at the University of California in Berkeley who demonstrates an example of how mimicking a complex biological system can result in a highly efficient robot. This episode then concludes with the third quarter of sci-fi author Jack Graham's "Selkies".