Biomimetic Robotics News

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Self-Contained Autonomous Soft Robot Demonstrates Rapid Body Motion

Soft robots — which don’t just have soft exteriors but are also powered by fluid flowing through flexible channels — have become a sufficiently popular research topic that they now have their own journal, Soft Robotics.

14 Mar 2014

New Propulsive Mechanism Discovered in Jellyfish

A Navy-sponsored project to design a biologically inspired, swimming jellyfish robot has led scientists to the surprising discovery of common bending rules for the tips of wings, fins, flukes, mollusk feet, and other propulsors across a broad range of animal species.

19 Feb 2014

Flight Aerodynamics of Fruit Bat Inspire Design of ‘Micro Air Vehicles’ with Flapping Wings

By exploring how creatures in nature are able to fly by flapping their wings, Virginia Tech researchers hope to apply that knowledge toward designing small flying vehicles known as "micro air vehicles" with flapping wings.

19 Feb 2014

Electric Fish Robots Show Promise to Develop Highly Agile Underwater Vehicles

The weakly electric black ghost knifefish of the Amazon basin has inspired Northwestern University's Malcolm MacIver and an interdisciplinary team of researchers to develop agile fish robots that could lead to a vast improvement in underwater vehicles used to study fragile coral reefs, repair damaged deep-sea oil rigs or investigate sunken ships.

17 Feb 2014

Scientists Design Termite-Inspired Robots for Building Complex Structures

"Termites are what inspired this whole research topic for us," said the study's lead author Justin Werfel, a researcher at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We learned the incredible things these tiny insects can build and said: Fantastic. Now how do we create and program robots that work in similar ways but build what humans want?"

14 Feb 2014

Global Snake Robot Market Poised to Grow

Research and Markets has announced the addition of a new report "Snake Robots Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts to 2019" to their offering.

4 Feb 2014

Study of Ants in Microgravity May Help Build Better Searching Robots

Several hundred ants have boldly gone where no ants have gone before: the International Space Station, high above Earth.

20 Jan 2014

High Hopes for Carnegie Mellon's CHIMP Robot at DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials

It's only been a few weeks since Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) completed assembly of its four-limbed CHIMP robot, but the Tartan Rescue Team has high hopes for the robot's performance at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials Dec. 20-21.

16 Dec 2013

Collaboration Between Biologists and Robotic Specialists Result in Innovative Robots

Collaborations between robotics specialists and biologists have never been so successful. The former draw their ideas from animal morphology while the latter have found in technology a useful tool for studying nature. Francesco Mondada, robotics engineer at EPFL, and Laurent Keller, specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), exchange their points of view.

11 Dec 2013