You’ve seen Eyebot. You’ve seen Handbot. The third and final piece of EPFL’s Swarmanoid project is, you guessed it, Footbot. Footbot looks to be a similar type of robot to another EPFL swarm project, employing the same mobility and docking technology. The idea behind Swarmanoid as a whole is that instead of having one robot with hands, eyes, and feet doing all those things you’d expect a humanoid robot to do, instead you’d just have whatever piece of a humanoid you happened to need for a particular task.

Most of the time, we humanoids (and humanoid robots) aren’t actively using all of our functional modules. Like, we’re either going somewhere, or looking for something, or performing some task with our hands. So really, there’s no need to have a complicated and expensive robot with integrated technologies that enable it to do all of these things at once. If you split all of these things into separate robots, as Swarmanoid does, you (hypothetically) retain all of the capability while expanding the versatility. Need a hands? A Footbot will bring you a Handbot or two, and there you go. And when you have the hands you need, the Footbot can go off and help someone else.

The biggest advantage, I think, of system like this is that you can easily (and, let’s hope, cheaply) replace or upgrade any component (read: robot) in the swarm. And by the same token, if any component fails, the swarm overall is largely unaffected. Compare this to a traditional humanoid: if one component fails, the entire robot is often rendered useless. There are also disadvantages, of course… It doesn’t seem likely that Swarmanoid will ever really manage to be nearly as creepy as androids can.

[ Swarmanoid Project ]

Last May, we wrote about a 7 gram robot grasshopper that is capable of jumping a distance of 1.4 meters, which is pretty huge for such a small robot. By using reduction gears and legs that act as springs, the robot is a very efficient mover, as well. We commented in that post that “the great thing about jumping is that it combines the advantages of being on the ground with one of the most important advantages of being able to fly: obstacle avoidance.” Of course, the other big advantage of being able to fly is that you can cover large distances quickly and efficiently (albeit mostly due to the aforementioned avoidance of obstacles).

Researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems have made their robot grasshopper into a true flier by adding another bit of real grasshopper anatomy: wings. Made of carbon, mylar, and shape memory muscles, the wings are fully controllable and the robot is able to steer itself towards sources of light. Eventually, the wings will be retractable and extendable just like a real grasshopper, and when integrated with the jumping legs and possibly some solar panels, you’ve got a tiny, cheap, extremely efficient robot capable of covering large distances over just about any sort of terrain by jumping, gliding, landing, and repeating.

Currently the wings and body aren’t really able to work together, so pending that, we’ve got videos of the two halves after the jump. (Read more…)