Robotics & Automation News

Where Innovation Meets Imagination

locomotion

Virginia Tech researchers aim to give robots bio-inspired gaits

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Two years ago, Kaveh Hamed saw his son Nikaan take his first steps on his own. He watched Nikaan’s one-year-old body teeter on wobbly legs as the baby walked forward.

And he saw Nikaan’s progress: he went from crawling on his belly to standing with a sway, to the first walks, to taking off across the floor on two sure feet.

These memories make Hamed think about math, as he does when he watches his dog Telli run. When he sees her bound toward him and switch to a trot, he starts to wonder again about the ways he might impart her agility to a robot. [Read more…] about Virginia Tech researchers aim to give robots bio-inspired gaits

Scurrying cockroaches help researchers steady staggering robots

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Ew, a cockroach! But it zips off before the swatter appears. Now, researchers have leveraged the bug’s superb scurrying skills to create a cleverly simple method to assess and improve locomotion in robots.

Normally, tedious modeling of mechanics, electronics, and information science is required to understand how insects’ or robots’ moving parts coordinate smoothly to take them places.

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. [Read more…] about Scurrying cockroaches help researchers steady staggering robots