Through a rather simple equipment, a giant amoeba command the movements of a six-legged robot. Perspective: draw some manufacturing secrets that will one day be useful to robots.Quand the robot to six feet away from itself a source of light placed nearby, it does to any software or even a network Neural. The pilot is… a mold! More precisely Physique polycephalum, a strange organism in forests under the fusillades. This nice six-legged robot moves systematically light. However, no programme and no human would command him to do so.
This kind of yellowish giant amoeba, which is usually a few millimeters but may reach thirty centimeters, eats bacteria and small mushrooms. It has no legs and no body. All the cells were merged into a single plasmodia. Biologists rank among the myxomycetes, along with a few zoological curiosities hardly classifiable or plants or animals.
In short, this modest living being is nothing that can make it the ideal driver for a hexapod robot. Yet the role that made him played Klaus-Peter Zauner, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton (United Kingdom), in collaboration with a team from the University of Kobe, Japan. The driver, it’s him! This Schumacher Car hexapod is a kind of mold inform, moving like an amoeba.Remote control
Each leg of the robot is flanked by a photoelectric cell. The six eyes are connected to a remote computer. When one of these sensors receives light, the computer turns on one of six lamps installed in a circle around the myxomycete. The small agency lives on an electronic circuit, which detects the slightest movement, transmitted to the computer. When he moves away from the light source, a movement command is sent to the corresponding leg of the robot, which begins to move exactly like the mold…
It would be enough to install the physique on the robot so it all, completely autonomous, becoming the first mold to pattes.Entre mold-pilot and the robot is – for now – a computer instructed to return the light signals received by the robot, and in return movements to be performed.
Specialists miniaturization
Saugrenu? Not so much. The idea of researchers is to imitate or even use the techniques used in nature, particularly for systems with very small dimensions. “At the nonsocial,” said Klaus-Peter Zauner New Scientist, we must learn to work with autonomous components, and allow molecules act as they do naturally. ” The sensors of physique over the diverticula’s of cytoplasm that constantly searching the environment, spraying our records miniaturization. There are hidden secrets usable without doubt…