If
four legs are good and two are bad, are six even better? That’s the
question roboticists have been trying to answer for a decade, ever since
boffins at the University of Pennsylvania, as part of a large DARPA-funded
consortium, invented the RHex
Hexapedal Robot platform.
While
the RHex is traditionally used for experiments on land, Researchers at McGill
University, in partnership with Dalhousie University and York University, have
also succeeded in buidling AQUA, which can swim underwater – even in
the open ocean.
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Which
is how this happened. What you’re seeing is a robot’s-eye view:
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It’s
all part of a larger effort to use a standard robotic platform to experiment
with strategies for sensing the environment and adjusting the robot’s
locomotion to navigate appropriately. Robotics, like computing, is becoming
standardized: platforms like RHex allow students and researchers to build on a
known system rather than having to re-invent the wheel each time. It’s code
re-use, but for robots.
This
facilitates stepwise innovations. Here’s the AQUA switching gaits as it goes
from land to sea:
Diving:
Climbing
a hill:
Following
a diver, reading gestures, clambering onto land like a primordial lungfish,
etc.:
Hexapodal
robots are simple and robust enough that Boston Dynamics, makers of the BigDog
pack robot, built a version for the Army. You can tell it’s militarized because in
every publicity shot, it’s covered with a Rambo-esque
quantity of camouflaging muck.
