Robytes
by Jeff Eckert
Bot Gets Bio Brain
This small mobile robot sports a
biological controller based on
cultured neurons. Courtesy of
the University of Reading.
Placing a functioning human brain
into a robot is still well within the realm
of science fiction, but some folks at
the University of Reading ( www.read
ing.ac.uk) have created a biological
brain of sorts and hooked it up as a
robot controller. It has been known for
some time that cultured neurons are
somewhat like ants that have been
scattered away from the anthill in that
they can no longer function as a single
unit. However, when interconnected in
a culture dish, such neurons form simple networks that display spontaneous
electrical activity and can function as
memories; i.e., they can “learn” things.
In this application, Prof. Kevin
Warwick and associates placed the
neurons on a multielectrode array
which is a dish that employs 60
electrodes to pick up the cells’ signals.
This activity is then used to control the
robot’s movement. When the robot
approaches an obstacle, signals are
sent to the “brain,” and its responses
are used to drive the wheels left or
right to avoid hitting the object. The
research is not aimed at creating
biomechanical robots of the future,
however. Rather, according to
Warwick, “The key aim is that
eventually this will lead to a better
understanding of development and
of diseases and disorders which affect
the brain such as Alzheimer’s disease,
Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and brain
injury. This research will move our
understanding forward of how brains
work, and could have a profound
effect on many areas of science and
medicine.”
Give Us Some Skin
Flexible ICs may give robots a
human-like sense of touch.
Courtesy of the University of Tokyo.
There’s a basic problem with
creating a layer of skin for a robot. For
the skin to provide tactile feedback, it
must be able to conduct signals back
to the “brain.” And if the skin is pliable
enough to bend with the bot’s movements, it has to be made of something
flexible, like rubber. The snag is that
rubber is a terrible conductor. But now
researchers at the University of Tokyo
( www.u-tokyo.ac.jp) say they have
developed a new, highly conductive
rubber, paving the way for robots with
stretchable “e-skin.”
The trick was to grind up some
carbon nanotubes, mix them with an
ionic liquid, and add them to the mix.
The resulting material flexes like ordinarily elastic but offers conductivity
about 570 times higher. Apparently,
one can use it to create elastic ICs that
can be mounted on curved surfaces
and stretched up to 1.7 times their
original size with no mechanical damage or significant change in conductivity. (You can stretch the stuff more, but
conductivity drops by about 50 percent
by the time you get to 2.3 times the
original size.) With further development of the material, bots of tomorrow may be able to feel temperature
and pressure like we do.
Must Be Nuts
This climber bot could boost coconut
pickers’ productivity by 800 percent.
It isn’t immediately apparent how
students at Troy High School (www.
troyhigh.com) became concerned
about the well-being of the world’s
professional coconut pickers, but they
are. It seems that gathering nuts from
the “tree of life” requires harvesters to
climb 100 ft trees and chop them
down with machetes, which is both
dangerous and inefficient. Hence, the
“robotic tree climber,” which the
students developed for the 2008
Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams event. The
remarkable feature of the remote-controlled device is that it can
accommodate changing tree
diameters, thanks to its employment
of a DryLin® QuadroSlide linear guide
system, which was donated by igus,
Inc. ( www.igus.com), a manufacturer
of various motion-related components
and machinery. The developers of the
climber tell us that it will allow pickers
to scale more than 40 trees per day, as
opposed to the present five to 10. Will
8 SERVO 11.2008
