Not content with hover bikes, jetpacks and exoskeletons, the US Army has contributed funding to a study which developed a robot modelled on a cockroach.
By studying the way cockroaches move, and also their specific size and shape, the team at the University of California-Berkeley say they were able to make a robot more intelligent without any additional software or sensors.
The robot they ended up with might look like an insect, but it is entirely man-made. Its thin and rounded shell enables the tiny automaton to fit neatly through and around obstacles without additional and expensive sensors. It's not the first example of a robot combining horrifically with a cockroach, but it's among the most important, because it enables existing machines to be made more intelligent through changing nothing except their physical shape.
The upshot could be significant; millions in research goes towards equipment and AI software with the aim of enabling robots to spot and avoid obstacles. Instead it would appear changing their shape could have an equally important impact on their ability to traverse real-world environments. The team envisages robots with the ability to transform their shapes on demand, so as to boost their intelligence physically and more easily navigate the world.
Published in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, the study could lead to new types of household and even military robots. Indeed the study was at least partially funded by the US Army Research Laboratory, along with UC Berkeley.
Lead author Chen Li of UC Berkeley said: "The majority of robotics studies have been solving the problem of obstacles by avoiding them, which largely depends on using sensors to map out the environment and algorithms that plan a path to go around obstacles... However, when the terrain becomes densely cluttered, especially as gaps between obstacles become comparable or even smaller than robot size, this approach starts to run into problems as a clear path cannot be mapped."
To tackle this the researchers recorded cockroaches with high-speed cameras moving through grass-like vertical beams, such as it might encounter on the floor of a rainforest. They then gave the insects three different artificial shells -- an oval cone like their own bodies, a rectangular shape and a flat oval -- and performed the experiment again. As the body became less rounded the insects found it more difficult to perform the rolls needed to make it through the obstacles.
When they carried out the test on their six-legged robot, the same results were found. Nature, clearly, had done this experiment before, as the cockroach shape was by far the best for making it through the obstacles. No other changes were made to the robot or its software -- the shape itself made the bot more intelligent. "There may be other shapes besides the thin, rounded one that are good for other purposes, such as climbing up and over obstacles of other types," the study said. "Our next steps will be to study a diversity of terrain and animal shapes to discover more terradynamic shapes, and even morphing shapes. These new concepts will enable terrestrial robots to go through various cluttered environments with minimal sensors and simple controls."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
