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Scientists conduct research and build robots that move like animals

Vaseline

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 millions of research dollars into creating a robot that can walk or run like an animal. Yet many animals are capable of feats that would be impossible for robots today.

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.”

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 titled “Why Animals Can Avoid Robots.”

A Lynx robot with Amazon Alexa integration on display in Las Vegas. (credit: REUTERS)

To answer why and how robots lag behind animals, they examined various aspects of running robots and compared 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.

To figure out how to move like animals

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 is due to the superiority of biological components.

“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.”

Optimistically, robotics researchers noted that if 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, progress has been remarkably rapid. has been.

“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 option. There are ways we can move much faster when we design robots than we can through evolution – but evolution has a huge head start.”

Practical 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, the technology has many potential applications.

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 existing hardware can be integrated and controlled. Donelan concluded that “as engineering learns integration principles from biology, walking robots will become as efficient, agile, and robust as their biological counterparts.”



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