Animal behavior scientists strive to understand why and how animals do the things they do. Up until recently, scientists had to rely on natural observations -- fortuitous encounters or staged interactions.  But advances in biorobots (mechanical robots that mimic live animals) are giving scientists unprecedented control over experimental variables, allowing them to run studies that would be unfeasible (or dangerous, or inhumane) in the course of normal research.  They have already proved valuable for testing various animal communication hypotheses: flocking, mate selection, and animal communication.  In this article, we examine new work by researchers from UC Davis and San Diego State University that pits a robotic squirrel, RoboSquirrel, against real-life rattlesnakes to study the subtleties of predator-prey interactions

I'm really excited about inflatable robots... they have the potential to be low-cost, lightweight, extremely powerful, and yet "human safe" -- ie. perfect for many robotics applications.  With that in mind, I would like to introduce you to two new (breakout) inflatable robots: a 15-foot-long walking robot (a Pneubot named Ant-Roach) and a complete, inflatable robot arm (plus hand).  Both of these robots were developed by Otherlab as part of their "pneubotics" project (in collaboration with Meka Robotics and Manu Prakash at Stanford University), with some funding from DARPA's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program.    These robots use textile-based, inflatable actuators that contract upon inflation into specially-designed shapes to effect motion.   Since these robots are built out of lightweight fabric-and-air structural members and powered via pneumatics or hydraulics, they exhibit large strength-to-weight ratios.  For example, Ant-Roach is less than 70 lbs and can probably support up to 1000 lbs; the inflatable robot arm is less than 2 lbs and can lift a few hundred pounds at 50-60 psi.  Be sure to read on for details and lots of videos!

I would like to introduce you to a new "elastomeric rolling robot" -- a soft robot made of inflatable, silicone actuators that pressurize in sequence to make the robot move.  This new robot hails from MIT's Distributed Robotics Laboratory and has a major distinguishing feature compared to other soft robots: it is entirely self-contained -- no more off-board electronics or pneumatics; everything is on-board. Two technologies facilitated this new robot:  (1) A "pneumatic battery" that uses mechanical feedback to self-regulate a chemical (hydrogen peroxide) reaction and maintain a stable pressure inside the robot's on-board pressure vessel.  (2) An energy-efficient pneumatic valve design based on electropermanent magnets (one of my favorite topics!).  These two new technologies were just presented at recent robotics conferences (ISRR 2011 and IROS 2011).  Be sure to check out the video below.

The Swarmanoid project is a cool twist on swarm robotics -- researchers use a heterogeneous swarm of robots to achieve distributed mobile manipulation. The swarm is comprised of three different robot varieties: Hand-Bots (manipulation and climbing), Foot-Bots (wheeled mobility and sensing), and Eye-Bots (quadrotors for recon and sensing).   The latest video of Swarmanoid retrieving a book won the "Best Video Award" at the Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI 2011) in San Francisco just the other day.  You can check out the robots and winning video below.

I just stumbled across an amazing new video (embedded below) from Howie Choset's Biorobotics Laboratory at CMU of a teleoperated snake robot climbing a tree.  While I have seen a lot of snake robots built over the years, including some amphibious versions that can swim, this is the first time I have seen one climbing a tree -- a task that some biological species do amazingly well!  This is clearly a case of personal ignorance; other snake robots from the Biorobotics lab have been performing similar feats for years, as evidenced by videos from 2008 (also embedded below).  However, I was sufficiently captivated by the new and old videos to share them with you.

Perching is one of the most common aerobatic maneuvers executed by birds and is representative of a large and important class of aggressive aerial maneuvers that take advantage of unsteady aerodynamics.  During a perching maneuver, birds often exceed 90 degrees in angle-of-attack, exploiting both viscous and pressure drag for rapid deceleration.  Russ Tedrake and Rick Cory at MIT's Robot Locomotion Group have drawn inspiration from these insane maneuvers by developing a gliding UAV that can perform perching -- eventually (presumably) allowing a UAV to perch and recharge on powerlines.  This is an impressive feat on many levels:  the physics (semi-turbulent flow, visualized in their photos), a controls perspective (dealing with high-speed maneuvers, non-linear dynamics, and real-time constraints), and an application perspective (the eventual integration of powerline recharging).  Be sure to check out the photos and videos!

Hizook previously covered a number of DARPA Chembot projects, including Dr. Hong's Whole-Skin Locomotion (aka amoeba robot) and the IRobot Jamming Skin Robot (aka "blob bot").  The original blob bot was rather creepy, but researchers from IRobot, MIT, and Harvard have ameliorated the situation by creating a decidedly non-creepy successor: a Chembot with soft (silicone?) selectively-inflatable body segments for locomotion.  Hopefully a fully-integrated version (power, actuation, and control) is near at hand. Read on for photos and a video of the new prototype.

This new robot blimp, powered by electroactive polymers (EAPs), comes from the Swiss Federal Labs for Materials Testing and Research (EMPA). It reminds me of the Festo Air Ray, and definitely ranks up there with other cool EAP robots like the Artificial Muscle EPAM variants previously discussed on Hizook.  Be sure to check out the video.

Back in 2007 and 2008, funding agencies had a pretty hefty interest in robots with amoeba-like locomotion, also known as whole-skin locomotion (WSL), blob 'bots, or Chembots.  NSF awarded $400k to Dr. Dennis Hong of Virginia Tech's RoMeLa Lab and DARPA awarded $3.3M to iRobot to develop such robots.  Now, most people are familiar with iRobot's jamming skin robot announced at IROS 2009 (photos / videos below).  However, I would like to share with you the equally-clever and interesting work of Dr. Hong, including a new whole-skin locomotion robot called ChIMERA: "Chemically Induced Motion Everting Robotic Amoeba" that was unveiled at a recent TEDxNASA event.  Dr. Hong's robots resemble those slippery water-snake toys that are incredibly difficult to grasp, with silicone skin (flexible but rugged exterior) and water or gel inside (soft interior).  Read on to learn more!

I would like to share a piece of work that I think is awesome on so many levels.  First, it involves the weakly electric knifefish: a curious creature that maneuvers via ribbon-finned propulsion (a marvel of fluid dynamics) and possesses an uncommon sensing modality in the form of electric field sensing (essentially electrostatic / capacitive sensing).  Second, the work models the fish as a dynamic system through its measured frequency response expressed in Bode plots, a process familiar to pretty much any type of engineer.  You read that right, they made Bode plots of a fish -- how cool is that!?  Be sure to check out the videos and photos below.

There has been a lot of press in the last six months revolving around El-E, the autonomous mobile manipulation platform for the motor impaired out of Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab (to which I belong).  There was a report in the NY Times on El-E's laser-pointer interface, and now a report in MIT Tech Review on El-E behaving like a service dog.  Recently, the lab's director (and my advisor) Dr. Charlie Kemp, gave an impressive talk at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute (CMU-RI) where he adeptly ties together these research initiatives and makes a compelling case for more autonomous mobile manipulators for the motor impaired.  Read on for the CMU-RI video and some choice images and themes from the talk.

Troody is a 16 DOF autonomously powered and controlled biped robot built to resemble a Troodon, a small carnivorous dinosaur that lived in the Cretaceous.   Troody remains one of my favorite robots of all time; when I was younger, its bio-inspired design (based off of actual fossil aspect ratios) and its lifelike movements were inspirational.  Unfortunately, Troody may have been a bit ahead of its time -- there was little hope of commercializing such a complex robot for aspiring youngsters like myself to play with.  Meanwhile, Troody's homepage has gone extinct, Troody is now in a traveling StarWars exhibit hangin' out with Darth and Yoda, and Peter Dilworth has moved on to WowWee (the creators of another pre-historic dinosaur robot, the Roboraptor).  We will miss you Troody...

Festo is known as a top-notch automation hardware manufacturer, but apparently their research division is capable of making very artistic, bio-inspired robots as well.  This post specifically examines their robotic dirigible and submersible manta rays, both of which harbor a life-like gracefulness.  I encourage you to check out the videos below; the technical specifications are provided for good measure.