What are biologically inspired robots?

In this HealthMaker video, Gregory Hager, PhD, chair of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, discusses how studying the way living organisms work can help engineers design robotic tools.

Transcript

00:00

So biologically-inspired robotics is looking at biological systems, which have obviously been highly

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adapted and optimized over millennia, trying to understand their principles of operation,

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and then using that understanding to solve problems for artificial systems.

00:20

So here's a really simple example. It's a great example from my colleague, Noah Cowan, at Johns Hopkins.

00:26

So you've all seen a moth fly, or any sort of insect of that type. You know, it's got the big, floppy wings,

00:33

but they have to be maneuverable. And you can imagine that with those big, floppy wings, it's kind of hard to imagine how you could make something that's

00:40

maneuverable when you've got this big surface to manipulate. But what Noah found out is that what the insect does,

00:50

as they started to model their flight, is they use their thorax, and in particular, the back end of the body, really, as a big lever.

01:00

So if it needs to change direction, what it actually does is it flexes. That flexing means that the inertia is applied to the body.

01:11

So that becomes momentum, moving the body in another direction. And now that they've changed the angle of attack, the wings can take over and move them in that direction.

01:19

And so he took that idea and said, well, if an insect can do that, suppose you take something like a quadrotor-- you know, basically a flying device--

01:29

which maybe wants to do the same thing. So most helicopter-like devices can't move sideways very easily because to do that same thing, you've

01:37

got to kind of tip the body, then use the propellers to move it sideways, and then tip it back.

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Well, what if I just add a big mass below it? And now I just flip that mass, the body flips instantly, moves over to the side, and I flip it back.

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And it's standing there. It's a perfect example of using engineering as a way of modeling what's happening in the physical world, taking those ideas,

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and now you can build a mechanism that does exactly that.