The Laser Mosquito Killer at TED 2010.mov. Inverted Pendulum 2. A Robot That Balances on a Ball. Big Dog. Robot with a rat brain. Modular robot reassembles when kicked apart. MTRAN3 Modular Robot. MIT Leg Lab Robots. iRobot's Cronenbergian Blob Bot is Ready to Roll, or Rather Ooze. iRobot, who brought us the Roomba and friends, have now devised a ball-shaped, undulating "chembot" under the auspices of -- who else -- DARPA.
The lovable machine resembles something you might find on a surreal dim sum platter: a pale, doughy blob that changes shape, inflates, deflates, and will ultimately be able to squeeze through tiny cracks in pursuit of its target. Last year, DARPA gave iRobot $3.3 million to work on the morphing chembot, saying "We believe that a new class of soft, flexible, meso-scale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their dimensions to perform various tasks will be quite valuable in many missions.
" The bot, which was shown off at the EEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems this week, has a silicone skin, and moves by selectively inflating and deflating parts of its spherical body. [via IEEE Spectrum]