TRANSCRIPT

Narration:
This is ROACH: Robotic Autonomous Crawling Hexapod. He’s a robotic cockroach. But word is he’s leading the Robot Revolution. That’s when he’s not scurrying under the furniture of course! Doing for robots what the invention of the PC did for computers since the 1970s.

Aaron Hoover:
There were computers for you know 20, 30 years before that but the PC really revolutionised things. The age of computers sprung up very quickly as soon as the PC kind of came into existence.

Professor Robert Full:
I think in the next few decades for robotics it’s going to be really exciting.

Narration:
What makes this guy different is the inspiration for his design.

DR GRAHAM PHILLIPS
Researchers just across the bay from here, over at Berkeley are taking their inspiration from Nature. They say the technology is now at a point they can start building their robots more like the creatures Mother Nature has produced.

Narration:
This is the biology lab at the University of California Berkeley that’s doing this revolutionary work. Robo Roach had his beginnings here.

DR GRAHAM PHILLIPS
So, what kind of cockroach is this?

Professor Robert Full:
This is the Death Head cockroach. He’s from Central America.


DR GRAHAM PHILLIPS
None that size in my house I’m sure!

Professor Robert Full: (VO):
Well there might be!

Narration:
Robert Full turned to Nature because of the shortcomings of traditional robots.

Professor Robert Full:
If you look at the typical robot what do you think of? You think of some big metal stiff thing that moves like a robot but that’s not how organisms move.

Narration:
Indeed organisms are the opposite of rigid…they’re soft and compliant. And that was the first biologically inspired rule for robot design.

Professor Ron Fearing:
We build our robots so they have this compliance and springiness in them so if a leg hits at the wrong position it doesn’t break anything it just bends out of the way.

Narration:
To create springy robots the team came up with an ingenious new way of making them…it’s deceivingly simple…seemingly little more than cardboard and sticky tape.

Narration:
A piece of cardboard is placed in a laser cutter and fold marks and preliminary cuts are put in it.

Narration:
The protective backing is removed, and a sheet of plastic self-adhesive placed on the cardboard. It’s folded, and put into a laminator. After further laser cutting…out pop the robot parts.


Dr Graham Phillips:
You can feel that’s quite springy.

Professor Ron Fearing:
Basically it’s just a Sarrus linkage.

Professor Ron Fearing:
It’s designed just using bending joints and we get a structure that only moves in one direction in a linear motion.

Professor Ron Fearing:
And here we’ve got a device which is designed to keep these two plates in the same plane – coplanar.

Dr Graham Phillips:
Oh Gee that’s remarkable. You would think by putting mechanical joints in there that would be quite a complex thing to build.

Professor Ron Fearing:
Yes we’d get quite complicated and you’d need to use very precision machining. Basically it’d be like the watchmaker technology.


Narration:
But springy parts were only part of the story. By studying how Nature’s many creatures walk, the researchers came up with a clever way of getting Robo Roach to walk…the second new principle of robot design.

Professor Robert Full:
We discovered for example that two four six and eight legged animals all move the same way on the ground, they all produce the same forces, so your one leg works like two legs of a trotting dog and three legs of a trotting insect or four legs of a trotting crab and they can all be described by a pogo stick.

Narration:
All creatures’ walks behave exactly like a weight on a pogo stick, where the stiffness of the spring is exactly the same for each animal, per kilogram of body weight.

Professor Robert Full:
It’s the same for every legged animal we’ve measured so far. So immediately we thought why not use that for a robot.

Narration:
Using that stiffness, and the right leg shape, the robot will automatically be stable without the need for motors and actuators in each joint. Indeed Robo Roach walks from just two simple leg movements.

Aaron Hoover:
The first way is in a direction that is called Ad or Adduction in biology and that’s basically the legs can swing in toward and out away from the ground so if my arms were legs this is this motion here okay. And then the second is sort of forward and back swinging of the legs. So if I move this middle plate forward and back and you can see that the legs sort of swing in this direction. And so essentially what we can do now is we can sort of lift the legs up and move them forward and put them down and move them forward again and propel the robot.


Narration:
In the future after an Earthquake packs of robotic roaches might work together.

Professor Ron Fearing:
You can image after an earthquake a building has collapsed and it would be very dangerous to send people in there so you could send in robots which are very small so they can go in narrow very small spaces and they can also be very cheap and then you could send in the rescuers when they know that there’s someone in there who needs to be rescued.

Narration:
And they could be deployed in the environment to monitor contaminant levels.

Aaron Hoover:
With very small and very mobile robots you could have a network of these sensors that are monitoring the environment and giving you an idea of what kind of impact you’re having.

Narration:
Getting inspiration from Nature’s creatures is not just for building better robots. The scientists have been studying lizards. The Gecko in particular might lead to a whole line of new products.

DR GRAHAM PHILLIPS
The gecko is an amazing creature. It can run just as fast up a wall as it can on a flat surface. Indeed it can run up a wall as smooth as glass. Now, there’s no glue on its feet, no Velcro-like hooks. In fact the way it clings on is quite remarkable.

Professor Robert Full:
We discovered their feet are bizarre!

Professor Robert Full:
If you look at an individual toe you’ll see it has leaf-like structures on it and those leaf-like structures are filled with millions of hairs. And the secret of how they stick actually is that each hair has the worst case of split ends possible, there’s about a hundred to a thousand split ends and they’re so small and the animal has about 2 billion of them and they get very close to the surface.

Narration:
So close the geckos’ feet stick using van der Waals forces…the very forces between molecules.

Professor Robert Full:
So they’re the forces you’ve learnt sort of in chemistry and physics where molecules all stay together whereby the electrons aren’t always exactly in the same place at the same time.

Narration:
The gecko’s already lead to inventions. Gloves with special fingertips covered with billions of hairs could pick up impossibly difficult pieces of glass. Try doing that with your bear hands! And there’s some unusual sticky tape.

DR GRAHAM PHILLIPS
Have a look at this demonstration: it is quite remarkable. This is what they call the gecko tape. Now if I put a glass like that on it, there’s no adhesion at all, no the slightest bit sticky. But place it there carefully and then tip it over and it just sticks there. The reason is this nano-tape actually has billions of fibres in it nano fibres – each one is 100th of the width of a human hair. There are 40 million of them per square centimetre and those fibres make the glass adhere to the tape.

Professor Robert Full:
We think a patch about like that can hold 20 or 30 pounds.

Professor Robert Full:
The applications for the gecko adhesive are almost unlimited if you sat down for an hour you could think of two hundred that we haven’t thought of.

Professor Ron Fearing:
Anti-slip coatings for shoes.


Professor Ron Fearing:
Automobile tyres. So you could have something that sticks to the road.

Professor Robert Full:
We made a little bandaid out of it. So a bandaid that doesn’t pull on your hairs. It’s aerated. You can move it around.

Narration:
The researchers believe these inventions – including Robo-roach will be in use in just 3 to 5 years. And the reason this guy could be like the PC and herald the Robot Revolution is because, like the PC, he’s relatively easy to build: it takes only hours from start to finish. But could robots that mimic Nature one day get out of control and take over the world?

Aaron Hoover:
Right now I’m naively saying I’m not worried about it. But I won’t give you any guarantees.

Professor Ron Fearing:
I think as long as we have the ability to unplug them there’s really no danger of that.

Narration:
And if things do go pear shaped, there’s always the traditional roach treatment.

Story Contacts

Professor Robert J. Full
rjfull@berkeley.edu
Director Poly-PEDAL Laboratory
Director CIBER
Department of Integrative Biology
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720

Professor Ronald S. Fearing
ronf@eecs.berkeley.edu
Dept. of EECS,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1770

Related Info

Prof. Robert Full's lab website

Center for Integrative Biomechanics in Education and Research

Ron Fearing's homepage

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