Thursday, November 20, 2014

Teaching Robots How to Fall

    Nature is often drawn upon for inspiration in developing technology. In this case, future search and rescue robots are being designed to imitate the way natural organisms fall, specifically human athletes and cats.  
    The intention is to develop robots that can land softly and reorient themselves in midair. In hopes of integrating these abilities into robots, everything from how to achieve the ideal landing angle to safe landing techniques are skills currently being observed in human athletes and cats.
    Robots today definitely have the processing power to compute what motors to move, and how to move them. The problem is that current motor technologies are not capable of moving fast enough. 
    Ideally, with this technology, robots will be able to reorient themselves and land safely regardless of how high they are falling from or how fast they are going.

No comments:

Post a Comment