The phones in our pockets might be getting more and more complicated , but many researchers move on the force field of robotics are really organise round-eyed bot designed to reliably execute very basic tasks . So rather of one Clarence Shepard Day Jr. face a terrifying future fill up with terminators , thesesquishy rolling donutsmight be our big threat .
Yoichi Masuda and Masato Ishikawa detail their work on these bot in a paper , Development of a Deformation - driven Rolling Robot with a Soft Outer Shell , published for the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics . Instead of seek to copy the social system and movements of humans or animals , the researchers have designed this automaton to function like the simplest of machine : the bike .
But a bike only functions when there ’s a tycoon root , and design a robot that only bring when it ’s push down a hill throttle its usefulness . Instead of motors and appurtenance , however , the steering wheel wall this robot is made from a soft material that ’s splash and stretch out by a set of four wires connected to an inner heart . It ’s still mostly drug-addicted on gravity to get around , as the robot is fundamentally repeatedly light over as its changing shape crap it unstable . But that also greatly reduces the amount of power it needs to move .
So what ’s the value of a strip down robot like this ? It ca n’t serve you breakfast in the break of the day , or peck up a gun and charge into battle , but it can be a valuable prick for exploring areas too dangerous for humans to trample , and too wild tosend an expensive piece of hardware . The robot ’s core can be bundle with sensors , even a 360 - degree television camera on either terminal , and rolled into a warzone for reconnaissance , or pointed at an active volcano and told to take on in . The odds of it get back in one piece are slender , but before its demise it could transmit lots of data point , which could cease up being far more valuable than the robot itself .
[ YouTubeviaIEEE Spectrum ]
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