Robotics engineers have worked for decades and invested many millions of research dollars in attempts to create a robot that can walk or run as well as an animal. And yet, it remains the case that many animals are capable of feats that would be impossible for robots that exist today.
"A wildebeest can migrate for thousands of kilometres over rough terrain, a mountain goat can climb up a literal cliff, finding footholds that don't even seem to be there, and cockroaches can lose a leg and not slow down," says Dr. Max Donelan, Professor in Simon Fraser University's Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology."We have no robots capable of anything like this endurance, agility and robustness.
The researchers each studied one of five different"subsystems" that combine to create a running robot -- Power, Frame, Actuation, Sensing, and Control -- and compared them with their biological equivalents. Previously, it was commonly accepted that animals' outperformance of robots must be due to the superiority of biological components.
"It will move faster, because evolution is undirected," says Burden."Whereas we can very much correct how we design robots and learn something in one robot and download it into every other robot, biology doesn't have that option. So there are ways that we can move much more quickly when we engineer robots than we can through evolution -- but evolution has a massive head start.
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