News Section | Physics
Now, sand-swimming robot with tiltable head to navigate disaster debris!
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have recently built a robot that can penetrate and ‘swim’ through granular material, which can help rescuers in their search work after natural disasters, like devastating earthquakes.
They showed that varying the shape or adjusting the inclination of the robot”s head affects the robot”s movement in complex environments.
“We discovered that by changing the shape of the sand-swimming robot”s head or by tilting its head up and down slightly, we could control the robot”s vertical motion as it swam forward within a granular medium,” said Daniel Goldman, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics.
The study was conducted by Goldman, bioengineering doctoral graduate Ryan Maladen, physics graduate student Yang Ding and physics undergraduate student Andrew Masse, all from Georgia Tech, and Northwestern University mechanical engineering adjunct professor Paul Umbanhowar.
“The biological inspiration for our sand-swimming robot is the sandfish lizard, which inhabits the Sahara desert in Africa and rapidly buries into and swims within sand,” said Goldman.
“We were intrigued by the sandfish lizard”s wedge-shaped head that forms an angle of 140 degrees with the horizontal plane, and we thought its head might be responsible for or be contributing to the animal”s ability to maneuver in complex environments,” he said.
For their experiments, the researchers attached a wedge-shaped block of wood to the head of their robot, which was built with seven connected segments, powered by servo motors, packed in a latex sock and wrapped in a spandex swimsuit.
“The ability to control the vertical position of the robot by modulating its head inclination opens up avenues for further research into developing robots more capable of maneuvering in complex environments, like debris-filled areas produced by an earthquake or landslide,” Goldman added.
The study was recently presented at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai.
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