Jump, the agile robot to help in catastrophes
Jump, the agile robot to help in catastrophes
Copy the agility of the gálagos to move quickly among the debris
US scientists created a particularly efficient jumping robot, which could become an indispensable tool for rescue teams working on difficult terrain, for example, among the rubble of buildings destroyed by an earthquake.
This robot, inspired by the glabla, a small primate that is the best jumper in the animal kingdom, weighs 100 grams and is 26 centimeters high when fully deployed. Designed by engineers at the University of California at Berkeley, it was presented on Tuesday in the first issue of the journal ScienceRobotics.
"What initially inspired us were the conversations with the rescue teams at a training site, where there were huge piles of debris simulating collapsed buildings," Duncan Haldane, a robotics researcher at Berkeley and one of the researchers, told a telephone press conference. creators.
These engineers were inspired by the animal kingdom and determined that the creature best suited for vertical jumps with a rapid frequency was the goblet, capable of taking five jumps in four seconds to a combined height of 8.5 meters.
"Our goal was to develop a victim search robot small enough not to cause additional landslides and to be able to move quickly through different types of debris following the collapse of buildings," he said.
For the robot, called Salto (Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles), this capacity is 1.75 meters per second, which is higher than the performance of the bull frog, but below that of the gálago.
To obtain the same results, these robotic engineers designed Salto's two lower extremities with a mechanism that allows their electric motor to store energy in a spring, which is multiplied by the successive jumps.
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