While certain people might have you believe that the robot uprising is here, bots are still incredibly helpful to humans for now. In fact, they may even save your life one day.
Engineers at the California Institute of Technology and Northeastern University working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory created an animal-inspired robot dubbed the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) that shapeshifts to navigate any environment it encounters. The team believes that the device has widespread applications in automated package delivery, scientific research, and search and rescue operations—and may one day include AI so it can do so automatically.
“We have designed a robot capable of negotiating unstructured, multi-substrate environments, including land and air, by employing its components in different ways as wheels, thrusters, and legs,” the team wrote in a paper of their findings published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
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The study’s authors drew inspiration from animals like meerkats, which stand on hind legs; sea lions, which walk on land using flippers; and chukar birds, which use their wings to walk up steep terrains in addition to flying. Combining these ideas, they designed a robot that has four wheels that include built-in fans that can transform into propellers to let the M4 take flight in a few seconds.
Actuators in its body give it the ability to shape-shift into various configurations, including raising one end of the M4 to allow it to move up a 45 degree incline like a chukar bird using its wings to climb a hill. It can also roll and tumble over obstacles it encounters in the terrain.
This multi-modal approach allows for greater versatility and results in a kind of general purpose robot that could have applications in a lot of fields. For example, firefighters can use the M4 to search a building on the verge of collapse for survivors without endangering any rescuers. Then, they can use that same robot later to survey a forest fire.
“Imagine the need for mobility inside tight, collapsed stairways and corridors on top floors,” the authors write. “In that case, M4 utilizes diverse forms of ground locomotion, including four-wheel rolling and crouching, two-wheel rolling and standing (with or without thrusters), quadrupedal walking, or tumbling to negotiate inside collapsed floors.”
The engineers aren’t stopping there. They plan on building on their current design to add even more features and abilities to the M4.
“Future work will involve expanding M4’s modes even further,” the authors wrote. “For instance, dynamic legged locomotion gaits are a potential addition to existing capabilities. This goal can be achieved by increasing the number of degrees of freedom in the legs to support natural gaits.”
The team added that designs might even include an algorithm in the M4 to detect and automatically transform depending on whatever terrain it encounters. This would allow for greater efficiency since a human controller won’t have to observe through a camera and make a guess at what obstacle is in its way.
Hopefully, they avoid using whatever AI is behind the Tesla autopilot feature.
