For now, it's palm-size, sure, but what if something terrible happens, and it can't stop inflating?
(Credit: YouTube screenshot by Leslie Katz/CNET)We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in St. Louis this week.
DARPA envisions the palm-size ChemBot as a mobile robot that can traverse soft terrain and navigate through small openings, such as tiny wall cracks, during reconnaissance and search-and-rescue missions. It gets around by way of a process called "jamming," in which material can transition between semiliquid and solid states with only a slight change in volume.
In ChemBot's case, a flexible silicone skin encapsulates a series of pockets containing a mix of air and loosely packed particles. When air is removed from the compartments, the skin attempts to equalize the pressure differential by constricting the particles, which shift slightly to fill the void left by the evacuated air.
In that way, the weird little blob inflates and deflates parts of its body, changing size and shape--and scaring the living daylights out of us. We don't know exactly when ChemBot will join the Armed Forces, but we can only beg: please, oh please, keep it away from us.
(Via IEEE Spectrum)
iRobot has secured a multimillion-dollar R&D contract for a new type of soft, flexible robot for the military, the company announced Tuesday.
The "ChemBot" project was awarded to iRobot from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Army Research Office.
iRobot did not release any preliminary diagrams or details on what the ChemBot might look like. But some ideas on what a ChemBot might be like can be gleaned from a request for proposals DARPA put out in March 2007. The robot DARPA wants to see must be a soft, flexible, mobile robot that can squeeze into hard-to-reach places. The goal is to make a robot that would be "soft enough to squeeze or traverse through small openings, yet large enough to carry an operationally meaningful payload," according to DARPA's request. The robot will also need to change in size and shape to fit a given situation's needs.
The ChemBot project led by iRobot will include team members from iRobot, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with expertise in chemistry and material science, as well as those versed in the expected actuator, electronics, sensor, and computer technologies.
The ChemBot will be used for reconnaissance and search-and-rescue type missions, according to iRobot.
Small and nimble seems to be the latest robo-interest.
SRI International released footage of its sticky wall-climbing robots in April. BAE Systems announced in early May it secured a $38 million contract with the U.S. military for its spider-like intelligence-gathering robots. Finally, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle announced earlier this month that they are developing "robofish" for gathering information at sea and that the military is interested in a school of its own.
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