A new generation of animal-like robots is about to emerge from the laboratory

UNTIL recently, most robots could be thought of as belonging to one of two phyla. The Widgetophora, equipped with claws, grabs and wheels, stuck to the essentials and did not try too hard to look like anything other than machines (think R2-D2). The Anthropoidea, by contrast, did their best to look like their creators—sporting arms with proper hands, legs with real feet, and faces (think C-3PO). The few animal-like robots that fell between these extremes were usually built to resemble pets (Sony’s robot dog, AIBO, for example) and were, in truth, not much more than just amusing toys.

They are toys no longer, though, for it has belatedly dawned on robot engineers that they are missing a trick. The great natural designer, evolution, has come up with solutions to problems that neither the Widgetophora nor the Anthropoidea can manage. Why not copy these proven models, the engineers wondered, rather than trying to outguess 4 billion years of natural selection?

The result has been a flourishing of animal-like robots. It is not just dogs that engineers are copying now, but shrews complete with whiskers, swimming lampreys, grasping octopuses, climbing lizards and burrowing clams. They are even trying to mimic insects, by making robots that take off when they flap their wings. As a consequence, the Widgetophora and the Anthropoidea are being pushed aside. The phylum Zoomorpha is on the march.
To create their artificial cephalopod they started with the animal’s literal and metaphorical killer app: its flexible, pliable arms. In a vertebrate’s arms, muscles do the moving and bones carry the weight. An octopus arm, though, has no bones, so its muscles must do both jobs. Its advantage is that, besides grasping things tightly, it can also squeeze into nooks and crannies that are inaccessible to vertebrate arms of similar dimensions.

After studying how octopus arms work, Dr Laschi and her team have come up with an artificial version that behaves the same way. Its outer casing is made of silicone and is fitted with pressure sensors so that it knows what it is touching. Inside this casing are cables and springs made of a specially elastic nickel-titanium alloy. The result can wrap itself around an object with a movement that strikingly resembles that of the original.

The hug of a monopus

Arms race

So far, Dr Laschi’s robot is not so much an octopus as a monopus, but she plans to correct this over the next two years by adding seven more arms and a control system that can co-ordinate them all. The aim is to produce an automaton that could help people do difficult jobs underwater—shutting off leaking oil valves, for example.

Another group of engineers at Sant’Anna, led by Paolo Dario and Cesare Stefanini, are also copying an aquatic creature. This one is a fish: a lamprey.

Lampreys are the simplest living vertebrates. Like octopuses, they have no bones (though they do have a rudimentary skeleton made of cartilage). Their nervous systems are simple, too, which makes them a good starting point for studies of the neurological arrangement that eventually spawned the human brain. Sten Grillner’s group at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has therefore spent many years studying lampreys, in order to gain insights about vertebrate nerves.

His latest way of doing so is to look at robot versions of the fish. Dr Dario and Dr Stefanini have built him a device called Lampetra (pictured top), which is made of circular segments modelled on the lamprey’s cartilaginous vertebrae. Each segment has an electromagnet attached to it, and these are activated by a current that flows from head to tail in more or less the way that a nerve signal flows in a real animal. A segment therefore first attracts and then releases the next, creating a wavelike movement that propels the robot forward.

Lampetra has eyes, in the form of small cameras, and can use information about colours and shapes that these cameras gather in order to get around obstacles. Indeed, the project’s main aim is to explain how vertebrates use perception to guide their movements. But Lampetra’s unique propulsion system could also have useful applications, as it has proved an efficient way to move a machine through water.

Another zoologist who is using robots to understand the behaviour of real animals is Daniel Germann, of the University of Zurich. He works on clams and is building robot versions of them to find out how the shape of an animal’s shell affects its chances of survival.

Many types of clam escape predators by burrowing into the sea bed using alternating movements of their shell and of the soft, muscular foot contained within that shell. These two parts of the animal take it in turns to act as an anchor, while the other digs further into the sediment. Clams also soften the sediment by expelling jets of water from between the valves of their shells. As a result, they can disappear from view in a few seconds, if threatened…… Continue reading Zoobotics →