These Robots Literally Just Flap Their Wings. That's It. But the Army Loves Them.
- GaneshMartin (Hosur)
- Oct 21, 2019
- 3 min read
The U.S. Army, with funding from the National Science Foundation, has paid researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University to come up with a new form of modular robots.
Using tiny robots, called "smarticles," the scientists could use those to build larger robots for a variety of purposes in different situations, outlined in a paper published in Science Robotics.
Military applications could keep humans out of dangerous environments or allow the robots to get inside tiny spaces where people simply cannot fit.
Robots have a couple typical components: motors, actuators, legs, and wheels, to name a few. But these tiny modular robots called "smarticles," or "smart active particles," are breaking the rules. They don't do anything at all except flap their "wings," making them look like spazzed-out fidget spinners.
The magic isn't necessarily in the tiny robots themselves, although they're entertaining to watch. It's about what they do together as a team. They join other smarticles to form larger robots.
The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Lab funded the research, which was conducted by experts at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University.
The endgame is to use these modular robots on the ground for real missions, according to a press statement.
"For example, as envisioned by the Army Functional Concept for Maneuver, a robotic swarm may someday be capable of moving to a river and then autonomously forming a structure to span the gap," said Sam Stanton, program manager of complex dynamics and systems at the Army Research Office, in the statement.
Robots ordinarily move through a combination of single-purpose components, meaning that each actuator, sensor, or limb has been built with a specific function in mind.
That's exactly what made it so challenging to create robotic elements that don't have a set goal in mind: the smarticles are "generic," the authors write in the paper's abstract, and it's difficult to control a collective of these smaller robots "because synthesis techniques typically assume known input-output relationships."
The smarticles, which are 3D-printed, can only flap their two arms. However, if you combine five into a circle shape, they nudge each other, which sort of looks like the flippers on a pinball machine. That motion creates a robophysical system known as a "supersmarticle.
" Not only is that an awesome word to say out loud—try it!—but it also means that the whole thing can now move on its own, from one tiny, flapping device to something that can at least move like the Blob.
If other sensors are added to the supersmarticle, like detectors for light or sound, it could navigate pretty well simply by following the stimuli.
So how do you build what is essentially a Transformer? Daniel Goldman—the Dunn Family Professor at Georgia Tech's School of Physics, one of the smarticle researchers, and a renowned physicist for his work on biomechanics in animal locomotion—gave Popular Mechanics the details.
It doesn't really matter what the smarticles, which are made up of microcontrollers and microphones in this case, are made of, Goldman says. That's because the advances are more about the underlying physics concepts.
“The whole point is not that they’re made of anything in particular, but their dynamics. We happened to make them out of microcontrollers and microphones to listen to tones, but that’s just how we built them," Goldman tells Popular Mechanics.
"The principles involved ... slapping each other at random ... and learning how to make things not random is the physics concept we’ve come up with.”
The smarticles can't communicate in any way at the moment, so their movement is actually random, Goldman says. The individual robots bump into each other and push and pull and become entangled to create a larger whole.
Goldman's hope is to make a robot of other little robots, "none of which are particularly capable of on their own
... no one is special."
That's valuable not only in military applications, but in industry, too. When robotic parts break or an arm comes off, that's massive downtime to improve the robot. In the smarticle version, other smarticles could instantly replace and repair the missing link.
It all goes back to some fascinating research on fire ants, Goldman says. The bugs create complicated structures in soil that look like mounds of dirt, but contain complicated maze structures underneath.
“No ant in a reasonable amount of time could create a nest on its own ... that’s a motivating general principle [for this work], that you can do things as a group that no individual can.”
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