Robytes
by Jeff Eckert
When Penguins Fly ...
A group of autonomously flying
penguins. Courtesy of Festo AG.
This month’s menu of robotic
innovations ranges from the pragmatic
to the eerie, and Germany’s Festo
AG (
www.festo.com) manages to
service both ends of the spectrum. By
day, the company provides a range of
products and services in automation
technology, including pneumatic actuators, electromechanical components,
vacuum technology, sensors, and so
on. But by night, they sneak into their
Bionic Learning Network lab and —
with the assistance of universities,
institutes, and other companies —
create some fanciful things as a way
of innovating in the development
of sensor, control, and regulating
technology. They have built several
“autonomous, self-regulating, and
self-organizing systems” based on bio-mechatronics, an example of which is
the Air Penguin. According to Festo, it
“is an autonomously flying object that
comes close to its natural archetype in
terms of agility and maneuverability.”
It’s basically a dirigible with a 1 m^ 3
( 35 ft^ 3) of helium capacity, giving it
about 1 kg ( 2. 2 lb) of buoyancy. It
sports two wings each of which is
controlled by two actuators, giving it
the ability to produce both forward
and reverse thrust.
The birds move around by virtue
of a 32-bit microcontroller that gives
them free will to explore within a
defined space, and they talk to each
other via a 2. 4 GHz band radio.
Other specs include a 2. 48 m (8 ft)
wingspan, overall length of 3. 7 m
( 12 ft), and 50 hours of operation via
a 2,000 mAh, 4.2V Li-Po battery. For
a video of the creatures swarming
around, visit
www.festo.com/cms
/en-us_us/ 10296_10352.htm
#id_10299.
By the way, did I mention that
Festo has an underwater version
called AquaPenguin?
Chemical Bot Inches, Climbs,
and Deforms
Artist’s conception of the pending
SquishBot advanced chemistry robot.
Courtesy of Boston Dynamics.
Another company that pushes
the edges of what robots can do is
Boston Dynamics (
www.boston
dynamics.com) which has come up
with the SquishBot as part of a
program to develop a new class of
soft, shape-changing bots. According
to the company, “The goal is to
design systems that can transform
themselves from hard to soft and
from soft to hard upon command.
[Insert your own Viagra joke here.]
Another goal is to create systems that
change their critical dimensions by
large amounts, as much as 10x. Such
robots will be like soft animals that
can squeeze themselves through
small openings and into tight places.”
The program is based on previous
research at MIT (
www.mit.edu) with
slug robots and BD’s work on robots
that crawl, walk, and climb. As you
might have anticipated, funding is
provided by the Defense Sciences
Office at DARPA.
Bacterium-Size Bots
To Help Cure Humans
Artificial bacterial flagella are about
half as long as the thickness of a
human hair. Courtesy of the Institute
of Robotics and Intelligent
Systems/ETH Zurich.
Some micro-robots recently
developed by ETH Zurich
(
www.ethz.ch/index_EN) could
possibly claim title to the world’s
smallest, with a length generally
ranging between 25 and 60 m. They
are propelled by an external magnetic
field, and so we’re stretching the
definition of “robot” a bit. In any
event, the little corkscrews called
Artificial Bacterial Flagella (ABFs)
are being developed for biomedical
applications such as carrying medicines to targeted areas, removing
plaque deposits from arteries, and
modifying cell structures. Basically
just little spirals with tiny heads, they
move through a liquid like flagellated
bacteria. The head is a trilayer of
chromium-nickel-gold, which is soft-magnetic in contrast to the flagellum.
This enables the ABF to be steered to
8 SERVO 07.2009
