Australian robotic software firm Kadence Photonics has made the world’s first “female” robots. Peter Hill, the founder of Kadence says that after seeing a TV program about the female brain he decided the day after that his line of robots should be based on some of its merits. The female robots differ from other robots in their ability to co-operate and multitask and work toward their goals in a flexible way, whereas in traditional robots on manufacturing lines work on single tasks in sequential order. Or as Dr Hill puts it so elegantly: “If a man does the housework, he’ll load the washing machine then stand there and watch it. A woman will go off and do something else.”
Continue reading →

MIT’s Fluid Dynamics Lab seems to be on a biomimicry roll. I recently wrote about the robostrider. Now it is the robosnail that mimics the locomotion of snails. Their 3-link swimmer is actually very interesting as well, but has yet to receive its 15 minutes of media-fame like its siblings. This kind of research obviously helps biologists understand animals’ locomotion and is probably very interesting from the microfluid perspective (I wouldn’t know), but making use of animal locomotion methods in robots and vehicles definetly opens a range of new possibilities.
Continue reading →

Researchers at MIT have solved the mystery of how the insects known as water striders move across water’s surface. While it is no mystery how they manage to stay afloat (many of us have surely done experiments with water’s surface tension), previous theories on how they manage to move on the surface have proven wrong. The striders actually “row” on the water surface and the researchers have made a very simple robot that mimickes this behavior.
Continue reading →

New Scientist recently reported on a snake-like robot that uses genetic algorithms to learn how to move. If a part of the robot is damaged, the GA process will find a new method to move about, if the damage is not too severe for it to be able to move at all.
Continue reading →