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The Berkeley
team, led by postdoctoral researcher Chen Li, designed the shell
so it could perform a roll maneuver to slip through gaps between
grass-like vertical beam obstacles without the need for
additional sensors or motors.
The initial test results of the robot's performance are
published in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration &
Biomimetics, released on Tuesday (June 23).
Other terrestrial robots have been developed with the ability to
avoid obstacles, but few have been designed to traverse them.
Researchers used high-speed cameras to study the movement of
Blaberus discoidalis, otherwise known as the discoid cockroach,
through an artificial obstacle course containing grass-like
vertical beams with small spacing. Living on the floor of
tropical rainforests, the Blaberus encounters a wide variety of
cluttered obstacles, such as blades of grass, shrubs, leaf
litter, tree trunks, and fungi.
After examining the cockroaches the researchers tested their
small, rectangular, six-legged robot and observed whether it was
able to traverse a similar obstacle course. They found that with
a rectangular body the robot could not often traverse the
grass-like beams and frequently collided with the obstacles,
regularly becoming stuck.
When the robot was fitted with the streamlined shell it was much
more likely to successfully move through the obstacle course
using a similar roll maneuver to the cockroaches. This adaptive
behavior came about with no change to the robot programming,
showing that the behavior came from the shell itself.
According to Li, "our next steps will be to study a diversity of
terrain and animal shapes to discover more terradynamic shapes,
and even morphing shapes. These new concepts will enable
terrestrial robots to go through various cluttered environments
with minimal sensors and simple controls."
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