This is a robotic dragonfly. If I told you that some company had just invented it and it was flying around today, you’d probably be impressed. Instead, I’m going to tell you that it was developed by the CIA and was flying in the 1970s. And not just flying like proof-of-concept-it-gets-off-the-ground flying, but reportedly, the flight tests were ‘impressive,’ whatever that means. It was powered by an ultraminiaturized gasoline engine (!) that would vent its exhaust backwards to increase the bot’s thrust, and the only reason they seemed to have scrapped it was that its performance in a crosswind wasn’t that good:

In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency’s scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped. An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine.

A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant.

Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. “You watch them in nature, they’ll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece.”

In of itself, this dragonfly is not particularly crazy. It’s also not particularly crazy that it was done 30 or 40 years ago, I guess. What IS crazy is when you start thinking about the state of technology 40 years ago versus the state of technology today, and what might be possible now (but currently top secret) if they had an operational insect robot way back then. It blows my mind.

The CIA also came up with a robot squid (its mission is STILL classified) and a robot research fish named Charlie. Pics and video of that, after the jump.

CIA’s Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs developed the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) fish to study aquatic robot technology. Some of the specifications used to develop “Charlie” were: speed, endurance, maneuverability, depth control, navigational accuracy, autonomy, and communications status.

The UUV fish contains a pressure hull, ballast system, and communications system in the body and a propulsion system in the tail. It is controlled by a wireless line-of-sight radio handset.

Cute! And once again, seriously not bad for such a long time ago.

[ CIA Flickr ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

We’ve been keeping up with squishbots from the likes of Boston Dynamics and iRobot, but as this research from the Tufts Biomimetic Devices Lab shows, bio-inspiration might be the way to go. Caterpillars are particularly interesting models for soft robots because of their simplicity, durability, and adaptability, all of which you want in a robot. Also, their segmented design could make it easy to integrate different types of sensors and actuators in a modular style.

Specifically, Tufts is trying to figure out how caterpillars move around so effectively while (and let’s be honest here) being pretty dumb, even for insects. As it turns out, the caterpillar’s brain isn’t actually responsible for much, and its body does most of the locomotive work, even complex movements like climbing. The researchers have hooked up some caterpillars to computers to try measuring their nervous systems directly to see exactly how they do it, and it looks they’ve got some exciting prototypes in the works.

[ Tufts BDL ] VIA [ Discover ]

You probably don’t remember, but back in 2007 (which is forever ago, I know) we posted about a jumping robot called Mowgli from the University of Tokyo. This most recent video shows how Mowgli has evolved from a jumping frog to a jumping humanoid called Athlete, with some running (ish) thrown in for good measure.

Now, the running is obviously not entirely stable. But it’s pretty remarkable just how human-y Athlete appears, even as it’s falling. The reason for this is Athlete’s construction, which uses air muscles, limbs, and a joint structure specifically designed to mimic that of a human.

Generally, I’m not in favor of biomimicry if an alternate robotic system is capable of doing the same kinds of things more efficiently. Humans, though, have had a long time to get bipedal walking figured out, and even beyond humans, animals have ended up with the same basic leg structure, so it must work pretty well. In this case, specifically, the human model seems to have clear advantages over other running robots like ASIMO, for whom barely running seems to be at the technical limit of its movement capabilites.

To get Athlete to keep running, its foot sensors and inertial sensors need to provide feedback to the air muscles a bit faster. Researchers are optimistic that with a few tweaks, Athlete will be able to develop a stable sprinting gait, which (let’s face it) would be pretty amazing.

VIA [ IEEE ]

It looks like Snakebots are actually turning into useful little guys. Far from being robotic novelties, this type of demonstration shows that for some very common tasks, snake robots really are the best (and maybe only) way to go.

[ CMU Snakebots ]

Festo‘s always making cool stuff, and they’ve just posted some video highlights from back in 2007, including their Airfish and Airacuda, and (most of) a humanoid. Nothing new here, but still pretty cool to watch.

[ Festo ]

This video neatly demonstrates the utility of a jumping robot. EPFL’s jumper is simple, small, and cheap, but it’s able to rapidly negotiate an obstacle course that would be otherwise impassible by anything except a flying robot.

The robot plus its self-righting roll cage weighs 14 grams and measures 18 centimeters in diameter. It can jump over 60 centimeters high, which at over four times its own height, is definitely respectable. To steer, the jumping part of the robot is actually able to rotate around inside its roll cage to launch in any direction. Simple but effective.

I remember back in early 2008 when we first posted about this robot, and I wrote:

“Yes, it’s not exactly controllable. And yes, it doesn’t exactly land right-side up. But these are minor quibbles, and they’re being worked on.”

Quibbles solved. Nice job, EPFL. Now just make it fly…

[ EPFL ]

We’ve seen robotic fish that are fairly lifelike, but you probably wouldn’t call them fast. This one, though, is damn quick. Robopike (actually a robotic version of a chain pickerel) doesn’t actually do anything besides briefly accelerate in one direction, but it manages to do so at 4g, which is (for a very short amount of time) about equivalent to a top-fuel dragster.

Robopike (which hails from UMass Amherst) is a very, very simple design: inside its 50 centimeter long rubber body is a springy metal strip. The fish gets bent into a “C” shape by an external clamp, and when the clamp is released, the tail whips back and forth, propelling the fish forward at breakneck speed. The 4g acceleration is nothing compared to the 15gs displayed by startled real pikes, but it’s still 8 times more than any other robofish in existence.

The next step is to do away with all the external paraphernalia… Researchers are hoping to use motors in Robopike’s head to pull wires attached to its tail to enable the robot to bend itself. Once they understand the fundamental physics, the hope is that future robofish might use such bursts of speed to better deal with turbulence and to help them escape from robosharks.

VIA [ New Scientist ]

That elephant trunk robot arm thing from Festo that we spotted back in April has been fleshed out a bit, and if you ever wondered which robotic arm has the most practice handling giant eggs, well, you won’t after watching the video. I imagine that part of the reason that they chose eggs is to highlight how safe the arm is: since it’s not made of metal and uses air pressure instead of geared motors as its actuation system, you’re much less likely to get your skull fractured by a rogue movement.

Unfortunately, the downside of using air pressure (besides the inevitable complexity of the valve system) is that precision movement becomes quite difficult. Festo probably leads the field when it comes to fine manipulation with air powered muscles, but still, you can see from the video that the arm isn’t that great at precise tasks. One solution (that some other groups are looking into) is to combine air muscles for macro scale movement with a wrist and gripper powered by conventional servos. That way, you’d get the best of both worlds, at the expense of, well, expense… But hey, nobody said robots are cheap. And they’re most definitely not.

[ Festo Bionic Handling Assistant ]

Part of the appeal of flapping wing micro air vehicles is that (unlike helicopters) they offer some resilience against crashing into obstacles. Crashing is still bad, though, and (with some exceptions) significant damage to things that fly generally keeps those things from continuing to be useful. To mitigate this, Harvard University has developed an itty bitty differential to keep a pair of wings (say, on a robot bee or robot fly) generating the same amount of torque, even if one of those wings is damaged. The beauty of the PARITy differential (Passive Aeromechanical Regulation of Imbalanced Torques) is that it’s completely mechanical, and simply due to its design it will (for example) increase the flapping speed of a damaged wing to match the torque output of a paired, undamaged wing. Basically, it’s the same kind of thing that you have controlling the power to the wheels in your car, except about a million times smaller.

VIA [ Gizmag ]

We were among the very first to see the latest generation of Stanford’s gecko-inspired climbing robot, Stickybot III, earlier this year at the Stanford National Robotics Week event. While Stickbot III could stick to surfaces, the climbing technique (one of those harder than it sounds things) was still in the works. Just recently, they’ve figured out how get it climbing at a brisk 5 cm/sec, as you can see in the video above.

The tricky part now is making the robot completely steerable. To do that, the feet need to be able to rotate around to point backwards, since the adhesive is only sticky in one direction and won’t stick at all without some force being applied (i.e. the weight of the robot). So for example, in its current incarnation Stickybot III can’t climb headfirst down, since its sticky feet only work in the up direction. Therefore, the feet need to be able to rotate so that they’re always pointing up irrespective of the orientation of Stickybot itself. It’s what geckos (real ones) do, check it out:

It must be a mixed blessing to be developing a robot that’s so closely inspired by an animal. On the upside, if you need a clue about how to do something like turn while climbing, you can always just take a peek at the gecko itself. But at the same time, the actual gecko is going to be doing everything you want your robot to be doing, except way better and without trying.

At least it’s not cuter. And incidentally, Stickybot III is a she.

[ Stickybot ] VIA [ Stanford News ]

Thanks Salomon!