TURTLES times TWO
So, we've turned insects into cyborgs using
nerve stimulation. That's pretty cool and all, but
what’s cooler are turtles. Researchers at KAIST
in South Korea have managed to hack a live
turtle, adding a noninvasive steering system that
they've successfully used to get the animal to
follow an arbitrary winding path. (Yes, this means
we can have cyborg turtles now.)
The concept here is so absurdly simple it’s
amazing we don't have remote control pets
already. The turtles (they're red-eared sliders)
get an attachment to their shells consisting of a
half-cylinder that can be remotely rotated with a
servo. By rotating the half-cylinder around to
present the turtle with what looks like an
obstacle on one side or another, the turtle can be
encouraged to move towards whatever direction
appears to be obstacle-free.
The turtle has not been conditioned or
trained in any way; the cybernetic control system
is just tapping right into the turtle's innate
instinctive behavior of obstacle avoidance,
allowing voluntary control of the turtle. The word
So, think we need more robotic turtles? Well,
you’re in luck thanks to this robotic baby sea turtle
sorta thing. It's called Flipperbot, and it's designed to
help biologists figure out how animals with flippers
move in sand, so roboticists can figure out how to get
robots with flippers to do the same.
because plenty of other animals do, and sea turtles are
among the cutest of those. They've been busy flippering
around in sand for millions of years, so rather than
attempting to derive optimized flippery movement from
scratch, roboticists are “cheating” by simply trying to
duplicate what the turtles do, and determine what
makes that technique the one that the animals have
converged on.
This, of course, requires a robotic sea turtle that
is not quite as cute as the real animal, and roboticists
from Georgia Institute of Technology and
Northwestern University went ahead and built one.
"On soft sand, the animals move their limbs in
such a way that they don't create a yielding of the
material on which they're walking," explained
spokesman Daniel Goldman in a recent commentary.
"That means the material doesn't flow around the
limbs and they don't slip. The surprising thing to us
was that the turtles had comparable performance
when they were running on hard ground or soft
sand."
The key to maintaining performance seems to be
the ability of the hatchlings to control their wrists,
allowing them to change how they use their flippers
under different sand conditions.
"On hard ground, their wrists locked in place, and
26 SERVO 06.2013