Get yourself a greasy tub of popcorn, sit back and enjoy my "bug" article. It appeared in the Fall, 2005 issue of Case Engineering.
David Searls
They creep, crawl, slither, climb, scuttle and squirm. Some take wing. But don’t worry. They don’t knock down tall buildings like the irradiated ants of the 1950s sci-fi film classic Them! These creepy-crawlies don’t even have flesh and blood and muscle except in the most bio-mechanical sense. They move pneumatically. They’re robots. Feel better now?
Dr. Evil
The critters clattering metallically across the floor and lumbering up and down stairs or flying low overhead in their own brief videos, or looking like small, dead, mechanical versions of the baddies in Aliens, actually come from Dr. Roger Quinn’s Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab at Case School of Engineering.
The school’s biorobotics program began in the 1980s, by Drs. Randy Beer and Hillel Chiel. Quinn established the biorobotics lab in 1990 with Chiel and biologists Dr. Roy Ritzmann and Dr. Mark Willis. Mechanical engineering professor Dr. Malcom Cook guides students through the actual design and fabrication of the beasties.
The neatly bearded and unfailingly cheerful Quinn knows how his life’s work comes across to the general public, and he has fun with it. Why else would one of his campus email monikers be Dr. Evil?
The not-so-sinister professor can’t hide his enthusiasm. “I talk with generals and I talk with fifth-graders and they all say, ‘When can I get ahold of this?’”
“This” is any of the many versions of the creatures making the reputation of the school’s bio-robotics team of mechanical engineering and biology professors, and graduate students in both disciplines. Some of the multi-legged wonders resemble cockroaches. Some bring to mind crickets, while others could be the vaguely anthropoid nasties that lonely old prospectors keep running across on late, late night TV. And moth-, fish- and even tumbleweed-inspired models are taking early shape in the fertile collective imagination of this creative crew.
Think about the slow, humanoid robots that populated early sci-fi and even George Lucas’ modern mind. Now get rid of those images. They’re passé. Twenty-first century bots don’t look like us because they’re designed to accomplish tasks we’re, quite frankly, not very good at.
Sure, we’re the smartest critters out there (aren’t we?), but not the toughest or most mobile. We don’t fit in the tightest spaces. We can’t fly or swim underwater for long, and we don’t have much in the way of sniffers or…well, the list goes on.
Anyway, who’s up to crawling through smoke-filled rooms in search of survivors? Or waltzing down suspicious streets in hostile territory looking for IEDs before they find the undercarriage of personnel carriers? And do you really think you’re qualified to spend the rest of your life rolling around the super-hot plains of Mars?
Invasion of the Robo-Critters
Biorobotics is a field devoted to the design of mechanical devices that either “mimic” or are “inspired by” the movements and skills of their biological counterparts, and can be programmed to do tasks we can’t train the real deal to do. Why?
Imagine a war of the future where the military drafts bio-robots with sensors, rudimentary decision-making skills and miniature camera lenses. Your mechanical soldiers look and move like tiny insects. They fly behind enemy lines and park themselves on walls at the enemy high command and sends back film.
Another unit is composed of mechanical amphibians packed with explosives and released to swim underwater until they hit the beach. Think about the American lives saved had that been the first wave of attackers on D-Day.
It’s no wonder that an alphabet soup roster of military organizations and defense researchers, including NASA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Eglin Air Force Base have lined up to sponsor the university’s efforts and use or further advance whatever they like.
But it’s not all about war-making. The team is studying the flight patterns and scent skills of moths in an effort to come up with a robot that can take to the skies with chemical sensors to find explosives or gases.
“Dogs do it now, but they require a long period of training,” Quinn explains. “They have a shorter life span and can’t sniff out ordinance on the upper floors of buildings. And there’s an emotional impact when a dog is killed doing its job.”
Not so with a few twists of metal and electronic sensors.
Some of the smaller, handheld bugs in the lab look, well, cute. The Mini-Whegs™ is only three inches long, with combination wheels and legs for climbing stairs and perambulating a swift ten body lengths per second. Remember all those fifth-graders? Hold a Mini-Whegs for awhile and you can imagine someday seeing it in a Toys R Us near you. Who says all these bad boys have to save the world?
Or even work on it. Quinn’s team is also focusing on a cylindrical device that might someday roll with the wind on Mars, or any other planet where we can simply dump it. Rather than attempting to remotely control a single expensive vehicle on rugged alien real estate, release a bunch of these relatively cheap “tumbleweeds” and let ‘em go where they go, snapping pictures along the way.
As otherworldly as the potential, the school’s efforts are still fairly grounded. The “brains” of the creatures are offline while researchers focus on continuing to upgrade the mechanics of movement. Since cockroaches are pretty good at getting around—crawling, tunneling, scampering, turning on a dime—they’re a pretty good starting point.
You can sense Quinn’s frustration as he compares his decades-long effort to simulate the behavior of what most of us would incorrectly consider a pretty simple creature. Nature, it seems, has put to good use its 300-million-year head start.
“Real roaches have millions of sensors on board and they make intelligent decisions and make them rapidly,” says Quinn. “Each antenna alone contains 100,000 sensors. We’re so far from (the humanoid robot played by Will Smith in) I, Robot, it’s not even funny.”
Take leg movement. Each roach limb is jointed for “seven degrees of freedom” for maximum mobility. When on smooth surfaces, the legs move in a tripod formation, two on one side in association with one on the opposite. The gait changes when taking a hill. The legs now work in horizontal pairs, the front legs pulling. Meanwhile, antennae whipsaw through the air, touching approaching obstacles and sending electrical impulses to the brain for nearly instantaneous feedback.
How do Quinn and his people know so much about the creatures? That’s where the inquisitive biologists enter the story.
The Bug People
Alan Alda’s camera crew set him up. They had seen the cockroach room before the host of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers. So they caught on film his expression—and an outtake utterance you wouldn’t expect from the quintessential sensitive male—at his first sighting of the thousands of inhabitants of the big plastic garbage cans in a backroom of the university’s DeGrace Hall.
Dr. Ritzmann loves telling the story. Alda, filming a segment of the show on biologically inspired robotics that aired in 1999, had just met Blaberus gigantius. Lots of them, actually, and the "gigantius" part didn’t sit well with him.
But there’s more to cockroach-wrangling than making TV hosts squeamish.
“The idea,” says Ritzmann, who heads the biology team with fellow professor Willis, “is to learn from the animals how to build robots. But, since I’m not a particularly altruistic person, I want to learn from the robots what the animals are doing.”
Together, the two disciplines study and imitate, study and imitate. The roaches spend a lot of time in glass display cases and on see-through treadmills with high-speed cameras capturing every nuance of movement.
Researchers continually ponder how the deceptively complex creatures always find a way over, under or around obstacles, regardless of terrain. Not out of mere curiosity. Robots with treaded footing were used in the futile search for survivors immediately after 9/11, and failed miserably.
“The camera operators couldn’t see in the smoke and dust, and the robots were unsteady in the rubble,” says Ritzmann.
What was needed was greater mobility on unstable ground and semi-autonomous decision-making skills. Meaning, says Ritzmann, that “the operator could tell the robot where to go, but not how to get there.”
The Case Engineering team has responded, through the years, with the progressively more advanced Robots I, II and II. Then came Whegs™, the grandparents of the bugs the kids like so much. The further evolved Whegs II™ resembles insect life in general, but no species in particular. The mobility innovation of wheels and legs, all running on a single motor, gives the creatures speed without loss of footwork on inclines.
Even more importantly, Whegs II can “decide” for itself whether to crawl over or tunnel under an obstacle, depending on how the sensors on its antennae hit the obstruction. It’s a thrill to see footage of it striding purposely forward, confronting an obstacle with its metallic antennae, breaking stride, considering its options and either rearing up—thanks to the team’s invention of a hinged flexion joint that lets it bend its back so it won’t overbalance when rising—or bend to crawl under if higher ground is unattainable.
The Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab always has a ways to go. Like the life form that serves as its inspiration, the program stubbornly finds its way around every blockade, through every seeming dead end. Right now it’s power.
“The batteries are just killing us,” says Quinn. “A real cockroach lives on garbage”
As for the grad students in both disciplines, they have their own varied motivation. Nicole Kern practically stumbled into the robotics lab by accident. The mechanical engineering major wants to design a leg brace that, through functional electrical stimulation, will help the paralyzed walk again. She found that “human biology and robotics are paralleling. Getting a person to walk is, in some ways, like making a robot of them. The control system is the same.”
Like a real-life Robocop, minus the arsenal. Sometimes science keeps pace with the filmmakers.
