Creepy robots are all the rage these days. Following in the skin-crawling footsteps of the fabric-climbing Clothbot and the scurrying, insect-like CLASH, UC Berkeley roboticists have built a new robot that darts about like a cockroach.
That's because DASH, short for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, is a six-legged robot that's modeled on the movement techniques of cockroaches and geckos, using cleverly placed Velcro strips to replicate those animals' natural grappling abilities.
"Cockroaches continue to surprise us," said UC Berkeley integrative biology professor Robert Full, who worked a robotics group led by fellow professor Ron Fearing, a specialist in electrical engineering and computer science.
"They have fast relay systems that allow them to dart away quickly in response to light or motion at speeds up to 50 body lengths per second, which is equivalent to a couple hundred miles per hour, if you scale up to the size of humans. This makes them incredibly good at escaping predators," Full told the UC Berkeley News Center site.
The scientists, who published this week on PLOS One, said new evidence of how cockroaches, geckos, and other scrambling, nimble creatures can run full speed over a ledge or gap without falling inspired them to try to develop similar movement abilities in a robot.
DASH was modified when the researchers discovered that cockroaches use their hind legs to swing the rest of their bodies like a pendulum when confronted with gaps they need to cross, preserving about three-quarters of their running speed while doing so.
"As we made the gap wider, they would end up on the underside of the ramp," Jean-Michel Mongeau, a biophysics graduate student, told the News Center. "To the naked eye, it wasn't clear what was happening, but when we filmed them with a high-speed camera and slowed it down, we were amazed to see that it was the cockroach's hind legs grabbing the surface that allowed it to swing around under the ledge."
The researchers said a number of small animals use a similar technique to quickly scurry and swing themselves out of the sight of predators.
Fearing's robotics team then set out to modify DASH, an insect-like robot that the team had developed earlier, with the simple addition of the Velcro strips. The results can be seen in the video below.
The more roach-like DASH joins another UC Berkeley creation, CLASH, which is a robot that uses its sharp, pointed appendages to quickly scurry up and around vertical, textured surfaces. Earlier this year, Chinese scientists revealed the Clothbot, a small, fabric-clutching robot that pulls itself up pants and shirts by creating wrinkles with its pair of gripper wheels.
