Flying
around the room can be a hazardous business, to which anyone who has stepped out of
the shower to find that they are sharing their bathroom with a cockchafer will attest. That
is just one of the delights of Europe which has become rare in recent years,
although now that the pesticides are getting closer to being under control,
their numbers are starting to recover.
Insects,
like cockchafers, flies and ladybirds fly around at quite high speeds with
eyesight that has a short range. They lack the sophisticated sensors and
complex fast algorithms that we endeavor to build into our flying robots, note
that is robots not drones so they have to fend for themselves. The result is
that insects have a high collision frequency, albeit mitigated by rapid deceleration
just prior to impact.
Now,
Klaptocz et al from Lausanne have
decided to try the bug approach to the bugbear of robotic flying – it’s a sort
of crash and bounce philosophy so that the robot can pick itself up, dust
itself off and start over just as the cockchafer does. They have a video on
Phys.Org (1) and have a full paper in the IEEE Trans. Robotics (2).
Insects
have a light, bouncy, robust exo-skeleton with legs and things to get
them back to an even keel. This is the approach that the Lausanne group have
taken. They have framed a rotorcraft-flying robot with a light carbon fiber
cage and an artificial leg with which it can poke itself upright after an
inadvertent collision with a wall or window. (It is unlikely to find itself in
a bathroom, so you may step out of your Swiss shower with a modicum of
confidence that it won’t think it’s a cockchafer.)
Before
we dismiss this research direction as odd, think about many of the situations
where you might want a robot hunting you down. A cave or mine accident would
have very poor light conditions, as might part of a collapsed building, so flying
robots that can bounce back, keep calm and carry on would be the way to go.
- http://phys.org/news/2012-06-insect-like-robots-self-recover-video.html
- http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6213136
