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Stuart Garfield
MHT Emerging Technologies Forum: Robotics
Robot sampling at RoboBusiness 2009
IRobot family tree
The robotics industry is evolving: Researchers are developing robots made of biological material, inspired by robots that were, in turn, inspired by animals. Metal and plastic are giving way to genetically engineered soft materials, including cells and silk, and software is giving way to nervous systems as machines increasingly imitate living things.
Northeastern University biology professor Joseph Ayers, for example, is developing artificial nervous systems for his projects, the RoboLamprey and the RoboLobster, which themselves are biomimetic robots — robots inspired by animals. Rather than use a programming language, Ayers is using artificial neurons to control the robot and introduce chaos into the robot’s locomotion process, which translates physically as wriggling and squirming if the robot gets stuck on seaweed or rocks.
Ayers is adapting that nervous system for a millimeter-scale robot made from genetically engineered cells. He’s working with researchers from the University of California San Francisco, the University of Alabama and the University of Newcastle to develop a robot from organic material — using, for example, myocites, the progenitors of muscle tissue, which contract when exposed to blue light.
“We’re using what we know about building biomimetic robots to build organisms,” he said.
Funded by $2.2 million from the National Science Foundation, the synthetic biological robot will be an undulating robot like RoboLamprey. It could be used for invasive medical diagnostics, since it would be small, flexible and made of natural materials. “It’s probably more like a sperm than a lamprey,” he said.
Crawling like a caterpillar
At Tufts University, neurobiologist Barry Trimmer is developing robots made out of soft materials based on caterpillars that could squeeze through tight spaces, to search a pile of rubble, for example. With about $4 million in funding from the NSF, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the W.M. Keck Foundation, Trimmer and his team are developing a control system for robots that have no joints, no hard angles and no torque.
“We keep telling people we have a working prototype, and that’s the caterpillar,” he said.
The robot is made of silicone rubber, with shape memory alloy coils. So far, the researchers have gotten the robot to move and are working to get it to change shape. The lab is also working to replace the silicone rubber with modified silk, Trimmer said.
Trimmer said the robot could be used to survey biodiversity in rainforests or to locate land mines. The robot could also have applications in health care — it’s being tested moving through an artificial colon, Trimmer said.
Amos Winter, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT, is developing a robotic clam — the RoboClam — with $120,000 a year in funding from Cambridge-based Bluefin Robotics Corp. and its owner, the Battelle Memorial Institute. Bluefin and Battelle wanted a lightweight, low-energy anchor for autonomous underwater vehicles, such as the ones made by Bluefin, or for larger objects such as equipment from oil rigs.
“We figured nature had already figured out a good solution,” Winter said.
Winter said razor clams essentially transform the soil around them into quicksand and are ultra-efficient at embedding themselves in the ocean floor. The razor clam is simple, with one hinge on its rigid body and no brain, making it easy to mimic. “They don’t just close their shells and sit there,” Winter said.
After testing, the next step is to develop a self-contained prototype, at which point Batelle would likely take over the commercialization of the clam, he said.
Swimming like a tuna
At Boston Engineering Corp., researchers have built two prototypes of the tuna-mimicking Ghost Swimmer robot, according to principal investigator Mike Rufo. One focuses on propulsion from the tail, and the other on the shapes and sizes of the fins. The Waltham company plans to combine the two components in a second-generation prototype later this year.
The company is working under $30,000 in option funding, after a $70,000 Phase 1 Small Business Technology Transfer grant.
Rufo said biomimetics allows engineers to circumvent some of the recurring problems that crop up when using traditional methods. Advances in technologies including actuators, power sources and control electronics, as well as the shrinking costs of memory and processing chips have made biomimetic robots more feasible in recent years, he said.
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