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Believe it or not, we may soon find ourselves thankful for the mighty cockroach's ability to get through the tiniest of cracks to just about anywhere it darned likes. Inspired by roaches' ultra-flexible yet incredibly strong bodies, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology have developed a prototype for an insect-like rescue robot that could safely seek out humans in the kind of chaotic rubble that earthquakes and other disasters leave behind.
Study leader Kaushik Jayaram explained that the exoskeleton of Periplaneta americana normally stands about half an inch off the ground but can "squish down" to an impressive one tenth of an inch--"the height of two stacked pennies," he pointed out--by extending and redistributing its plated sections. During that process, the team found, a roach takes on compressive forces equal to around 300 times its body weight; however, you'd still need to exert the force of at least another 600 roach-weights (hitting 900 total) if you wanted to slow one down.
Jayaram, who developed the soft, "origami-style" prototype [PDF] with professor Robert Full at Berkeley's Poly-PEDAL Lab while completing his PhD there, also noted that the insects aren't just reliably flexible and hardy, making theirs an ideal model for picking through unstable terrain, but consistently speedy, too: “What’s impressive about these cockroaches," he said, "is that they can run as fast through a quarter-inch gap as a half-inch gap, by reorienting their legs completely out to the side," and by using surface frictions to keep pushing along at up to 20 body lengths per second.
Full and the Poly-PEDAL Lab team have long been examining different biological methods of movement for clues as to how humans (and their robots) could better get around, and they're not alone. As Scientific American reported earlier this month, researchers throughout the robotics field are looking outside the boxy, rigid shape of traditional robots for ways to build more pliable robots that're capable of a delicate touch. Cecilia Laschi of Pisa, Italy's Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, for one, has spent years fine-tuning an "artificial tentacle" using wires and springs to mimic musculature; the result--a device able to "undulate, elongate, shrink, stiffen and curl in a lifelike manner," the site explains--represents "a completely different way of building robots," Laschi said. Launched in 2014, the journal Soft Robotics has also sprung forward recently as a new medium for biologists, roboticists, and other soft-robot fans to keep their ideas for new designs and applications moving around (gently).
Growing demand for industrial and commercial bots with more refined motor skills has been driving the elongating reach of soft-robot research and startups. In 2014, Bloomberg cited estimates from Allied Market Research that the near future may hold "a $10 billion market for industrial robots that can handle materials better than humans," while Pneubotics CEO and co-founder Kevin Albert told the site that the demand for streamlined manufacturing robots may well be in the same ballpark.
Meanwhile, the search for optimal robot shapes and methods of movement isn't slowing down, and nature has provided plenty to choose from. For his part, though, Robert Full of the Poly-PEDAL Lab has a soft spot for one very tough insect. Regarding the long-term potential of U.C. Berkeley's robotic roach, Full commented,
[It's] only a prototype, but it shows the feasibility of a new direction using what we think are the most effective models for soft robots, that is, animals with exoskeletons ... Insects are the most successful animals on earth. Because they intrude nearly everywhere, we should look to them for inspiration as to how to make a robot that can do the same.