Servo - January 2012

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.