Robot Pterodactyls vs. Robot Lizards
What a day for robots… two exciting-yet-potentially-terrifying developments (see below, after the Mecha Ridley picture):
via KurzweilAI:
“A miniature glider robot capable of jumping, gliding and perching for search and rescue or detection of forest fires have been designed by researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems… Developer Mirko Kovac, currently a post-doc at UC Berkeley, imagines swarms of his robots equipped with different sensors and small cameras that could be deployed over devastated areas to transmit essential information back to rescue command centers. The robot design is scalable, he says.”
via Smart Machines:
“Natural disasters like earthquakes have always plagued human civilization, causing massive amounts of damage, destroying entire cities, and killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. While we are still helpless when it comes to preventing such disasters, researchers have found a way that can help search for survivors - with robotic lizards… Taking another leaf out of nature’s book, a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology is working on a locomotion robot that can swim through hard, yet fluid substances, such as sand or rubble. The 35 centimeter-robot in spandex-covered aluminium segments is powered by six linked motors. It borrows its design from the sandfish, a skink species resembling a lizard, which can dive deep into the sand to escape the heat.”
This is a Syfy original movie begging to be made.
It’s interesting, thinking about the diverse ecology of robotics - the different species that will evolve organically through billions of business and academic research project. I look forward to the day when round little robots clean my floor, pterodactyl robots rescue me from the glacier slope where I’m stranded, a cloud of nano-scanner-robots spy on my meetings, spider robots find my keys when I lose them…
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