If you need to make a robot perform a certain task, all you have to do is look to the natural world. Most likely, it has already made something similar, then your task is only to replicate. That’s the name of the game for students working at UC Berkeley’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. Nick Kohut and some colleagues from this lab have developed a robot they hope will be able to move around in many terrains and have an increased ability for turning so they can be sent into tight places during search and rescue situations.
Its six legs would make it some sort of insect but its whipping tail is definitely reptilian. Kohut called his invention the TAYLRoACH (tail actuated yaw locomotion roach). The body is made of a flat rectangular piece of cardboard polymer composite, light enough for agility and strong enough to make it durable. Its 11.5 cm tail is made of a carbon fiber rod with a steel pin at the end for weight and it amounts to 4 grams. The whole thing put together weighs 45 grams.
The robot has three independent 7 mm brushed DC motors. Two connect to each pair of legs and control them independently. The last controls the tail. This motor drives a custom gearbox with a high ratio of 85.3:1 for high acceleration. The tail is allowed to move 260 degrees and the robot has stoppers at the ends of that range that produce a moment when the tail whips and hits the stoppers. The robot can move 90 deg at a speed of 300 deg/sec or about 0.3 s with about a 4 cm turning radius.
The project was started in January 2011 and Kohut and his team presented the TAYLRoACH at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco earlier this month.
Still, the team has some work to do in order to improve the TAYLRoACH’s performance. Kohut says that making sure the legs make contact with the ground when the tail is whipping around is crucial. Since the legs are independently controlled at the moment, this is hard to control, but a phase locking mechanism would ensure contact when the bot needs to turn. They also want to add a position sensor to the tail. The TAYLRoACH project was supported by the Army Research Lab under the Micro-Autonomous Systems and Technology Collaborative Technology Alliance.
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