ROACH COACH
Meet Ant-Roach. Ant-Roach is called Ant-Roach
because to those with a fanciful imagination, it
looks a bit like a cross between an anteater and a
cockroach. However, it'll take an even more fanciful
imagination to figure out how to naturally make
that combo come to pass. Imagination or no
imagination, Ant-Roach exists, it moves, and you can
ride it. Plus, it's completely inflatable — muscles
and all.
Ant-Roach weighs only 70 pounds (seeing as
it's hollow and made of fabric) which means that
one reasonably in-shape person can carry it around
The muscles are driven from several central manifolds which dispense compressed air. A microcontroller receives a
wireless signal from a laptop running the control program to drive the robot.
So, why an inflatable robot? There are lots of reasons: they're cheap, they're (relatively) easy to build, they're (also
relatively) easy to fix, and
they have very high
strength-to-weight ratios.
Perhaps most importantly,
being full of air, inflatable
robots tend to be much
more compliant than their
metallic brethren, meaning
that they're inherently
safer to have operating
around humans.
www.otherlab.com/
news/2011/11/21/
the-ant-roach/
MIGHTY (FAST) MOUSE
Last year, a micromouse managed to negotiate a maze in
under five seconds. At the 2011 All Japan Micromouse Robot
Competition in Tsukuba, the micromouse shown here shaved
an entire second off of that time, completing the maze in a
mere 3.921 seconds. That's fast!
This robot — called Min7.1 — was designed by Ng
Beng Kiat. It has a top speed of just over 12 kph which is
wicked quick for something that's 10 cm long and weighs
only 90 grams. Of course, the micromouse has to figure out
where it's going before it can put the hammer down and
blaze through on its final run, which is why it first gets an
autonomous exploration phase.
www.np.edu.sg/alpha/nbk/
Cool tidbits herein provided by Evan Ackerman at www.botjunkie.com, www.robotsnob.com, www.plasticpals.com, and other places.
24 SERVO 01.2012