Servo - 201306

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.