BILL-Ant Wants To Carry Your Stuff
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 29 of February , 2008 at 4:22 am
Case Western Reserve has an entire lab dedicated to biologically inspired robots, some of which we’ve covered before. This guy is BILL-Ant, which stands for “Biologically-Inspired Legged Locomotion Ant.” Like a real ant, he’s a hexapod. He has 18 degrees of freedom in his legs, with a movable neck and force sensing mandibles. Also like a real ant, BILL-Ant can lift things. Although he can’t quite match the 20x lifting power of leaf cutter ants, this 6 pound bot can transport 7 pounds on his back, or stand still while holding 19 pounds. In the future, the designers anticipate multiple BILL-Ant robots autonomously cooperating to move objects and destroy all humans. Wait, scratch that, they’re just going to move objects. Let’s hope.
Click through to the BILL-Ant website to see some videos, although you’ll probably be underwhelmed at this stage in his development.
[ BILL-Ant ] VIA [ Robot Living ]
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Category: Research
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