When scientist's talk robots, Mother Nature is not far from their thoughts. Living things that walk, crawl, climb, swim and fly are the inspiration for the next generation of robotic creatures. But as any scientist will tell you, squeezing through a narrow space or scaling a wall is a lot harder for a robot than a cockroach or a gecko.
QINNN: When I started this about twenty years ago, I thought, how hard could it be to build an insect robot? But of course we are still trying to build an insect robot. They do some things like an insect but hey are nowhere near as good as the actual creature.
That’s Roger Quinn who runs the biologically inspired robotics lab at Case Western Reserve University. Quinn builds a variety of bio-inspired robots in his lab - including cockroaches and crickets ... only without the "eeew" factor. One robot, affectionately called 'whegs,' 'has a combination of wheels and legs organized like pinwheels with L-shaped spokes. Andrew Horschler, a graduate student in Quinn's lab, gives a demonstration.
HORSCHLER: This is mini- whegs …the spoked legs are designed to allow it to spin like a wheel but climb larger obstacles like a leg - so they can reach high, up and over things, things that a wheel would have trouble getting up and over.
The so-called ‘Mini-Whegs’ has been modified with specialized feet for different terrain - with sticky feet to climb windows and walls, traction for slippery floors, or even feet for the liquid like sandy surface of the moon. Other robots - like this one from Switzerland - have an entirely different set of skills
SOT// This is the salamander robot … it also swims. We would need a pool for that but it can swim.
We can take his word for that. Although a lot of robots were designed for things like space exploration, or search and rescue applications, bio-inspired robots are beginning to find their way into medicine as well. For example Quinn and others have designed a robotic endoscope - a small fiberoptic video camera used in colonoscopy- that mimics the motion of a worm. In doing so they have made a normally very unpleasant medical procedure virtually painless. Quinn says this is just the beginning of what medical robots may one day do.
QUINN: The most exciting thing is a microbot that you swallow that can go into your body and if you put a number of them in there they can actually fix you from the inside out without any surgery whatsoever. It's out there, yes, but it's not that far away.
And if THAT sounds like science fiction, also on the horizon Quinn says are soft, shape-shifting robots that can ooze through cracks and wind through tight spaces. However, not all biologists have such far out ideas. Tyson Hedrick is a professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel hill who studies moths. One day he noticed that a moth with a badly torn wing was still able to fly.
HEDRICK: In a typical flying machine - something like an airplane or a helicopter this would cause pretty rapid failure - the animal or the machine would crash.
But the moths DIDN'T crash. So to find out what was going on, Hedrick snuck up behind healthy moths with a pair of scissors and snipped off a chunk of wing --then videotaped what happened. The moths were startled, but were able to fly immediately. Computer models predicted the moths could best maintain stability by beating their wings slightly out of synch - right, left, right ,left- but what Hedrick discovered was that's not what they do at all - instead the moths beat the damaged wing harder and faster--a slightly less efficient but acceptable solution. Hedrick says sometimes an unexpected biological solution can lead to new insights.
HEDRICK: The idea here is to see what the animal here is doing see how they're accomplished, and see if we can take parts of that and incorporate them into engineered or human designed systems.
Systems that may one day prevent damaged airplanes from crashing, locate buried earthquake victims under the rubble, or make more medical procedures painless. And if nothing else, you'll never look at a cockroach quite the same way again. Gretchen Cuda, 90.3.