Why can’t robots avoid animals like pumas and wildebeest?

Many of us have seen impressive videos of humanoid robots that walk, talk, and even seem to think like humans. But can they do something and replace human workers? Can they even run faster than greyhounds or jump higher than pumas?

Robotics engineers have worked for decades and invested many millions of research dollars into creating a robot that can walk or run as well as an animal. And yet it remains the case that many animals are capable of feats that would be impossible for today’s robots.

Animals can run much better than robots. The performance difference arises from the important dimensions of agility, range and robustness.

“A wildebeest – an African member of the antelope family that resembles a cow – can migrate thousands of miles over rough terrain; cockroaches can lose a leg but still run fast; and a mountain goat can climb a cliff,” says Prof. Max Donelan of the department of biomedical physiology and kinesiology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “We don’t have robots that can do something like that.”

Wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) are seen during their migration to the greener pastures, between the Maasai Mara Game Reserve and the open plains of the Serengeti, southwest of Nairobi, in the Maasai Mara Game Reserve, in Narok County, Kenya, August 22, 2023. ( credit: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

He and colleagues from the University of Washington, the University of Colorado at Boulder; and the Georgia Institute of Technology just published a study in the journal Science Robotics under the title “Why animals can avoid robots.”

To answer the question of why and how robots lag behind animals, they examined various aspects of running robots, comparing them to their animal equivalents, for a paper published in Science Robotics. The paper shows that, according to the metrics engineers use, biological components performed surprisingly poorly compared to manufactured parts. Where animals excel, however, is in the integration and control of these components.

The researchers each studied one of the five different ‘subsystems’ that make up a rotating robot – force, frame, actuation, sensing and control – and compared them with their biological equivalents. Until now, it was generally accepted that the better performance of animals than robots was due to the superiority of biological components.

Robots have yet to catch up with animals

“It turned out that, with only minor exceptions, the engineering subsystems outperformed their biological equivalents – and sometimes even radically outperformed them,” the authors wrote. “But what is also very clear is that, if you compare animals to robots at the whole system level, animals are great in terms of movement – and robots have yet to catch up.”

Optimistic for the field of robotics, the researchers noted that when you compare the relatively short time robotics has had to develop its technology with the countless generations of animals that have evolved over many millions of years, the progress is actually remarkable went quickly.

“It will happen faster because evolution is undirected,” she added. “While we can easily correct how we design robots and learn something in one robot and download it into every other robot, biology doesn’t have that ability, so there are ways we can move much faster when we design robots than we be able to. by evolution – but evolution has a huge head start.”

Effective walking robots are more than just a technical challenge and offer countless application possibilities. Whether solving last mile delivery challenges in a world designed for humans that is often difficult for wheeled robots to navigate, conducting searches in hazardous environments or handling hazardous materials, there are many potential applications for the technology.

The researchers hope that their research will help guide future development in robotic technology, with the focus not on building a better piece of hardware, but on understanding how to better integrate and control existing hardware. Donelan concluded that “as engineering learns integration principles from biology, walking robots will become as efficient, agile, and robust as their biological counterparts.”

Robots have yet to catch up with animals

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