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The pesky cockroach may be earning more respect soon. As this ScienCentral News video reports, the creepy critters are inspiring some new robots that could end up helping to save lives.
Hardware Bugs
Cockroaches, perhaps the most unpopular of all unwelcome insect houseguests, have probably been around for 280 million years, and they'll probably still be around after we're gone. These speedy, hearty critters are almost indestructible— they can even live for a whole week without their heads.
"Roaches, if you want to do small things that run fast, are a pretty good exemplar," says Cutkosky. "They're very robust, they move remarkably fast— 20, 25 even up to 50 body lengths per second for the American cockroach. That's much faster per scale-to-size than you and I can run. They're very stable and they run with a very simple control system."
One of the "Sprawlettes"
Like roaches, the Sprawl robots are hexapedal (having six legs). "There are some particular advantages to a hexapedal design, and it may be part of the reason why most insects are hexapedal," says Cutkosky. "The way that insects usually run is that they do a gait that's called the alternating tripod— you've got the front and back leg on one side, and a middle leg on the other side, and that makes a triangle. That's a stable platform, like a three-legged stool. And then it switches to the front and back on the other side, so there's two alternating tripods. And that's intrinsically pretty stable."
The latest member of the Sprawl family, iSprawl (for "independent Sprawl"), is wireless and can travel fifteen body-lengths per second— the equivalent of a person running 55 miles per hour. But it's not just the speed of a roach that inspired the Sprawl robots. It's also the stability. "When [roaches] go over very rough terrain, it's not like you and me going over, say, boulders at the beach, where we kind of look carefully where we put each step, and watch our balance," explains Cutkosky. "They don't do that. They just go. And they kind of assume that the mechanical suspension system that they have is gonna take care of things. They're not carefully maintaining balance, they're not watching carefully where feet get placed, and they can afford to do that because they have six legs, [and] because the legs are sprawled out."
In fact, the roach's ability to sprawl its legs out is behind the name of Cutkosky's robot family, which includes Sprawlita, Sprawly Davidson, and FrankenSprawl. "[Sprawling is] something that only works if you're very small," he says. "You can't have, for example, a horse with its legs splayed out like this because it's just too heavy." All of the Sprawl robots are "on the order of a third of a kilogram, kind of palm-sized— maybe the size of a fat rat, and as a result, they can't be quite as sprawled as an insect would be," he explains. "But they are more sprawled than a larger animal, like a dog or a cat."
iSprawl, the fastest of the Sprawl family, is wireless and can travel over 15 body-lengths per second. It is about 12 centimeters long.
One goal of the Sprawl project is to produce small, cheap, fast robots that can help search for things. "I think the Navy is interested in applications like looking for buried landmines," says Cutkosky. "There are substantial parts of the world today that are almost uninhabitable because of buried landmines. So what you'd like to do is to have small robots that could scurry around and locate them, and if a bunch of the robots get blown up, well, if they're cheap, then who cares? Also, people have looked at things like surveillance, or maybe finding survivors in the wreckage of an earthquake."
As they bio-inspire potentially lifesaving robots, might cockroaches improve their reputation? "I don't know that I like cockroaches any better," says Cutkosky, "but I have more respect for them."
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