Thanks to its legs, whose design faithfully reproduces feline morphology, EPFL’s four-legged “cheetah-cub robot” has the same advantages as its model: it is small, light and fast. Still in its experimental stage, the robot will serve as a platform for research in locomotion and biomechanics.
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Rats and mice have long been a model for researchers aiming to understand the complex impact of alcohol and other substances of abuse on behavior and the brain’s reward systems. But now, a team at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) has demonstrated a new method for such experiments that promises to yield large amounts of data quickly and consistently, thereby potentially reducing the number of live animals needed in research. The secret? Robotic fish.
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John Innes Centre scientists will participate in new €2 million EU-funded research to programme more “intelligent” and adaptable robot swarms.
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The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that Hansjörg Wyss (Harvard MBA, '65), the entrepreneur and philanthropist who enabled the Institute's creation in 2009 with a $125 million gift, has donated a second $125 million gift to the University to further advance the Institute's pioneering work.
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Dr. Aaron Ames, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is part of multi-university team that has received a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research into cyber-physical systems (CPS).
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The tail of a seahorse can be compressed to about half its size before permanent damage occurs, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. The tail's exceptional flexibility is due to its structure, made up of bony, armored plates, which slide past each other.
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In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory last summer, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.
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Dubbed “Flipperbot”, the robot has been presented today, 24 April, in IOP Publishing’s journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, and was designed to test how real-life organisms, such as seals, sea turtles and mudskippers use flippers and fins to move on surfaces such as sand.
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Scientists have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources.
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Virginia Tech College of Engineering researchers have unveiled a life-like, autonomous robotic jellyfish the size and weight of a grown man, 5 foot 7 inches in length and weighing 170 pounds.
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