Teaching a hexapedal robot to walk like a stick insect
One day in the near future you could be lying incapacitated in the middle of an earthquake-ravaged landscape where wheeled vehicles can’t reach you. Or in the very distant future, after engineers have solved thousands of problems associated with saving interplanetary astronauts from radiation, your great-granddaughter could be lying incapacitated in the middle of a marsquake-ravaged landscape where wheeled vehicles can’t reach her.
So, who’s going to save you (or her)?
If it’s up to an international group of researchers led by Japan’s Tohoku University and Thailand’s Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology (VISTEC), it might just be a massive insectobot – one that learned to walk over different surfaces through AI-powered biophilic copying of stick insect locomotion.
"It's remarkable that a few steps from a single stick insect,” says Dai Owaki, Associate Professor at Tohoku University, “were enough to find a principle that works on a machine five...
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