[Tyler]

Robots: Jumping and Crawling in Millirobots
     


Anyone who has studied insects knows why they are such a great source of
inspiration for roboticists: They are a treasure trove of extremely diverse and
surprisingly simple and robust solutions to complex tasks highly
relevant to robotics, including locomotion, navigation and sensing.
Insects consistently outperform today's robots in all complex real-world
tasks and do so using a minimum of hardware and energy.
The latest episode of Robots
talks to Sarah
Bergbreiter from the University of
Maryland, who looks at methods to manufacture insect-sized robots.
We then talk to Aaron Hoover at
the University of California in
Berkeley who demonstrates an example of how mimicking a complex
biological system can result in a highly efficient robot. This episode
then concludes with the third quarter of sci-fi author Jack Graham's "Selkies".


   

http://robots.net/article/2684.html