by Jeff and Jenn Eckert
Mechanical Frog Legs Demonstrated
A fairly ingenious device — said to be inspired by a frog — has been demonstrated
by Jianguo Zhao and his team, at Michigan State University ( www.msu.edu). As you
might imagine, building a device that's capable of hopping is not all that difficult, but
the problem is getting it to land upright or at least right itself after landing. Here we
have a mechanism described as a "controllable and continuous jumping robot" that does
the latter, and yet it is driven by only one motor and weighs only 20 g — including the
To power a jump, the motor pulls the little bot's body downward, compressing four
springs. Then, the drive gear engages a lever that releases the legs, and up it goes. It
invariably lands on its side, but as the motor again pulls its body down to its legs, it also
deploys little arms that push it back to a standing position before it hops again. The 8
cm device is capable of jumping about 50 cm skyward, and it can do it 285 times on a single 50 mAh battery. It's not clear
that it has any practical use, but it's fun to watch. You can take a look at www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxHRqZGQM38.
The frog-inspired jumperbot
developed at Michigan
Where are the Books?
No, this isn't Ten Forward on the
Enterprise or the snack bar at the
Buckminster Fuller Institute. It's the new Joe
and Rika Mansueto Library at the University
of Chicago ( mansueto.lib.uchicago.edu). If
it's true that traditional books are a dying
species, this $81 million edifice is all the
more appropriate, as all of its books are
buried underneath the reading room inside 24,000
If you enjoy meandering down rows of bookshelves and
allowing unfamiliar titles to grab your attention, you're out
of luck here. In this place, books are fetched by five robotic
cranes. You request a particular book from an online catalog
and, about five minutes later, it arrives for pickup.
The library has been celebrated as an "automated"
facility but, in fact, it appears to involve
about as much human labor as a
standard configuration. Because the
storage and retrieval system handles only
bins (not individual books), library staff
must manually open and close the bins,
scan the item’s barcodes, and deliver the
selected publications to and from the
front desk. On the positive side, the
tomes are stored under optimal environmental conditions, so
they should still be in nice shape long after e-books have
made them obsolete. Plus, visitors get a nice view of the
world outside. That has to be worth $81 million.
In case you are wondering, namesake Joe Mansueto is
the billionaire CEO of Morningstar, Inc., and he and his wife
kicked in $25 million of the cost.
Reading room at the University
of Chicago's Mansueto Library.
Shiver Me Timbers!
ReconRobotics' Scout Throwbot,
being reconfigured to fight piracy.
ReconRobotics ( www.reconrobotics.com) is a provider of tactical micro-robotic
systems used by the US military, international friendly forces, and various law
enforcement agencies, bomb squads, and fire and rescue teams. One of its products
is the Scout Throwbot which — as you might gather from the name — is designed to
be thrown through windows, over walls, down stairs, or even dropped from a UAV.
The latest news from the company is that it has joined with Space and Naval
Warfare Systems Center Pacific ( www.public.navy.mil/spawar/pacific) to develop
a version with magnetized wheels that "will, among other things, enable the robot
to climb up and over the hull of a ship. ReconRobotics believes that this concept
could evolve into a new micro-robot platform that would have immediate
applications in maritime piracy interdiction and in protecting the lives of shipboard military personnel."
The 1.2 lb unit is even fitted with an infrared optical system for operation in complete darkness. The units will be
delivered by an unspecified "marsupial robot deployment system" which is basically a bigger robot carrying the Scout. Given
that Somali pirates typically ride around in fiberglass and inflatable boats, the device will unlikely be particularly effective in
preventing hijackings. But, at least we may be able to see what they're up to after the fact.
8 SERVO 08.2011