Sense of Wonder | Biomimetic robotics

David Cerezo's Weblog

Sat 13-03-2004 07:45 PM

Biomimetic robotics

Please click on the images to get more information.

Flowers

MIT's Flowers

Anemone

MIT's Anemone

Fishes

Berkeley's Calibot MIT's Pike MIT's Tuna

Frog

Berkeley's Frog

Lobster

Northeastern's Lobster

Ants

iRobot's Ants

Flying Insects

Berkeley's Micromechanical Flying Insect

Sprawl

Stanford's Sprawl

Scorpion

Fraunhofer's Scorpion

Snakes

Berkeley's Snake Mark Sherman's Snake Gavin Miller's Snake GMD-Snake

Lamprey

Northeastern's Lamprey

Dolphin

Bionic Dolphin

Lemur

NASA's Lemur

Cat

Iguana Robotics' TomCat

Ape

MIT's Ape

Human-like robots

University College London's Elvis MIT's Kismet MIT's Human Legs Waseda's Emotion Expression Humanoid Robot

   Biomimetic robots sure are fun to build and a good investment to get future funding but we should not really need Nature’s pool of ideas: current animal’s shape is based on all previous evolutionary designs so, although adapted to their environments, they’re not the best possible design. Moreover, there are fundamental differences between animals and these robots:

  • energy production/consumption is equally distributed over an animal’s body, but in a robot, the production is localized in a specific position.
  • information processing is usually distributed over the robot’s body.
  • robots do not fix themselves.
  • lack of sensors compared to animals.

   A process of optimal shape design must take into consideration factors such as energy consumption, survivability, degrees of freedom, etc... to calculate the best achievable trade-off.