The 5th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems will be held this year in beautiful Edinburgh, Scotland,18 -22 July. The three-day event, organised by the Convergent Science Network, will be hosted at a fantastic venue consistent with the spirit of the conference, the Dynamic Earth: a 5 stars visitor experience with incredible interactive technology to learn about natural events and much more….

The conference will offer amazing talks on a variety of topics related to the fields of biomimetics and bioybrid systems and technologies at the intersection of living and artificial systems. The program includes 5 plenary lectures from excellent experts in the field. The plenary lectures will be complemented by short talks on diverse topics such as robotics, active sensing, navigation, locomotion and others.

You can find out more about the plenary speakers HERE, the full conference programme will be published shortly!

The Living Machines conference will be preceded by a one-day satellite event, hosted by the University of Edinburgh Department of Informatics, and consisting of a series of research-oriented workshops. You can submit your workshops HERE.

We are looking forward to seeing you this year in Edinburgh!

Robotic Lobster by Prof. Josef Ayers at Northeastern University. Photography Jan Witting

Here are some examples of small biomimetic robots, inspired by sea creatures and insects, developed by scientists around the world

The RoboClam

RoboClam MIT

Inspired by the Atlantic razor clam, this small energy efficient robot, developed by Amos Winter at MIT can dig holes into the sand like a razor clam. This was possible since the researchers have understood the principle behind this clam’s ability  — localized fluidization — and were able to give a robotic digging clam similar abilities.  The RoboClam may be useful to monitor a biological situation under water or to bury anchors and terminate underwater mines. “And the study of the robot gives deeper insight into the important mechanics behind burrowing through localized fluidization” says Amos Winter. https://youtu.be/bztw9PUiRss

Row-bot

Row-bot with its mouth open. Hemma Philamore, Univ. Bristol/BRL

Inspired by the water beetle, at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a group of scientists have been developing a robot called Row-bot that can swim in remote locations by harvesting energy directly from the water using a microbial fuel cell as an artificial stomach.

“When it is hungry the Row-bot opens its soft robotic mouth and rows forward to fill its microbial fuel cell (MFC) stomach with nutrient-rich dirty water. It then closes its mouth and slowly digests the nutrients”. The Row-bot may be useful for environmental clean-up of contaminants in natural and man-made disasters.

3D-printed soft robotic tentacles

3D-printed robotic tentacle. Cornell University

Using an elastomer and a 3D printing technique, engineers at Cornell University have developed a method to re-create soft actuators. Using their new technique, a digital mask projection stereolithgraphy system, they have produced pairs of actuators that mimic the function of octopus tentacles.

As reported in a paper published in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, the researchers believe that “this nascent printing process for soft actuators is a promising route to sophisticated, biomimetic systems” https://youtu.be/BZ5W7LyyKL0

The RoboBee

RoboBee. Wyss Institute

This very small flying robot, inspired by the biology of a bee, was initially developed by researchers from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University in 2004. The RoboBee, designed at Robert J Wood’s lab, is a micro-robot, smaller than a fingernail, that flies and hovers like an insect, flapping its transparent wings 120 times per second. The research effort around the RoboBee project is believed to “foster novel methods for designing and building an electronic surrogate nervous system able to deftly sense and adapt to changing environments; and advance work on the construction of small-scale flying mechanical devices”. Scientist anticipate that these devices may have an impact in advancing fields ranging from entomology and developmental biology to amorphous computing and electrical engineering. http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpage/428/

The Tabbot

Tabbot. by Ingo Rechenberg

The robot Tabbot has the looks of a cartwheeling desert-dwelling spider and it is named after tabacha, which means spider in the local Berber language in northern Africa. According to its developer, engineer Ingo Rechenberg “…such a means of locomotion would be an advantage in a device meant to navigate the rough surface condition on Mars“. Rechenberg, who teaches biomimetics at the Technical University of Berlin, believes that this kind of tumbling robots can be used in agriculture as well as on the ocean floor. https://youtu.be/OHo32JrkDRk For more biomimetic robots see our previous blogs and  Biomimetic robots at Robot SafariEU in London and Biomimetics: Where’s it at?

Sepios robot
Credit: ETH Zurich

A new marine robot, called Sepios, has recently joined the ever-growing robotic animal kingdom. Built by a group of students from Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, this biomimetic robot was inspired by yet another marine creature, namely a cuttlefish. The interesting thing is that Sepios can actually do better than the creature that inspired it.

Cuttlefish have two elongated fins that produce a beautiful undulating motion and allow these animals to move forward and backward, turn on the spot, or hover. Sepios has four such fins. The extra pair makes it possible for the robot to propel itself in any direction, including straight up and down, and rotate on any axis. Simply put, Sepios is omnidirectional, which cannot be said about the cuttlefish.

The fins are driven by the total of 36 servo motors and can reach the maximum speed of 1.8 km/h.

Perhaps the robot’s biggest advantage is that its fins cause very little turbulence and allow for a greater control as opposed to many other underwater vehicles. Sepios, for example, can easily navigate through patches of sea grass without leaving a mess behind.

Such properties suggest that Sepios will come in handy for marine life observation. The video below certainly proves the point, as Sepios seems to get on quite well with real fish.

Sepios is not the first biomimetic robot to use undulating propulsion. Its predecessors include this knifefish robot developed by researchers at Northwestern University and another cuttlefish robot from NextGen Aeronautics. Still, Sepios is the first to feature four undulating fins, making it the only truly omnidirectional vehicle that uses this kind of propulsion.

The amount of robots inspired by various marine critters has increased tremendously in the past years. Various types of fish, mollusks and even jellyfish consistently provide scientists with new ideas.

You may also be interested in this recent announcement from the National University of Singapore, which is developing a whole range of bio-inspired marine robots, including a smart robotic sea turtle.

C-Enduro vehicle sets off
Credit: National Oceanography Centre

Several decades ago, Earth observation satellites transformed how we keep track of changes on our planet. Now we are rapidly crossing a new technological threshold that will allow us to pick up even the most subtle variations in the environment.

Imagine swarms of autonomous robots roaming the globe by land, sea and air, together producing the ultimate picture of what is going on on our planet. This great vision is already becoming a reality – or at least with respect to the sea.

Recently UK scientists have unleashed an entire fleet of autonomous marine robots to travel about 500 km across an area of southwestern UK. The fleet comprises 4 types of vehicles, including both underwater and surface ones. The great thing is that all the vehicles rely on renewable sources of energy, thanks to which they can spend months offshore without any human intervention.

Instruments on board the vehicles record key parameters of the ocean, ranging from the temperature of the water to the density of plankton populations. Equipped with GoPro cameras, the robots are also expected to take some spectacular shots of marine life.

The Exploring Ocean Fronts project is led by the National Oceanography Centre and is already referred to as the most ambitious of its kind in Europe. The project is now in phase two, in which several vehicles are attempting to track acoustically tagged fish. The goal is to get an insight into the daily habits of marine life, which, believe it or not, we know very little about. The obtained information will inform future decisions regarding ocean management, including those directed at achieving sustainable fisheries.

Potential benefits of such massive robot observation missions, of course, go way beyond that. For instance, a better understanding of how the ocean varies over time and space can immensely benefit climate and weather research.

Xenex’s germ-zapping robot
Credit: Xenex

With the official Ebola death toll approaching 5,000, scientists are increasingly concerned with exploiting all possible ways of fighting this deadly disease. While the biggest labs around the world are working on a vaccine that will hopefully exterminate Ebola once and for all, roboticists are developing more unconventional ways of preventing the spread of the disease.

Recently, a lot of media attention has been focused on Xenex, a San Antonio-based company, which has developed a robotic assistant that helps medical professionals remove traces of infectious diseases, such as ebola, left in hospital premises. Even better, the robot can fence infections out 24/7 with 99,9 % efficiency, thus preventing any potential delays in the operation of a hospital.

The robot does that by firing powerful ultraviolet pulses that wipe out all nasty viruses and bacterias sneaking in the corners of hospital rooms. And while the technology of scrambling viral DNA with ultraviolet light is not particularly new, the idea of a roboticized Ebola killer is certainly to everybody’s liking.

But here is the catch: it does not take a genius to realize that Xenex’s machine has no more right to be called a robot than any other piece of medical equipment. What Xenox has developed is not an autonomous Roomba-like Ebola hunter. Essentially, it is a wheeled cart with a programmable ultraviolet lamp, and, although there is no doubt about its effectiveness in killing Ebola and other germs, we should choose words properly.

Does this mean, however, that robotics has nothing to offer in the biggest recorded outbreak of the virus?  Fortunatelly, the answer is no. Even existing medical robots have a huge potential for fighting diseases like Ebola, but deciding how to effectively use them in harsh conditions, such as those in West Africa, is a complicated issue.

In an attempt to clarify how robots can contribute to the ongoing battle, the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) at Texas A&M University is organizing a policy workshop on Safety Robotics for Ebola Workers. The workshop will help identify what robots can do in order to minimize human contact with the virus, detect the virus and provide expert consulting to those who contracted the virus. You can learn more about the upcoming workshop HERE.

Credit: University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign

Robots can be very strong, fast and enduring. However, unlike in animals, none of this strength comes from muscle, instead robots mainly rely on electrical motors and other hard and generally inflexible parts. But with all the advantages that conventional robot hardware can deliver, it still does not match the ability of muscle-powered animals to provide an accurate response to different physical environments. To address this downside of robotics, a group of researchers, led by Professor Rashid Bashir, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign developed tiny walking bio-robots powered by engineered muscle tissue.

The robot consists of a 6 mm long flexible 3D-printed backbone with two strains of muscle attached to each of its ends. The backbone has two little feet and is used both for walking and sustaining the structure. The important thing about the robot is that the muscle tissue used in it is the skeletal muscle, the one humans use to move around, which means that it can be easily turned on by administering electric impulses. Furthermore, by adjusting the frequency of the impulses, the robots’ speed can be modified.

The use of skeletal muscle allows for a better control over the robots’ movements. This significantly differs from the previous study conducted by the same group, where the researchers used heart tissue, which contracts non-stop and with a constant rate.

This technology is an important step on the way to integrating biological tissue in machines, which in some cases can be priceless. For example, muscle-powered robots are perfect for medical applications inside the body: the tissue is a perfect biodegradable material and such robots could run in a nutrient rich fluid without any additional power source. In addition, the use of muscle-powered limbs in biomimetic machine design would open hundreds of new possibilities, especially in the field of soft robotics. Imagine how much more lifelike a robotic starfish or octopus could be if powered by muscle tissue!

With the concept of a muscle-powered robot tested, the researchers are now preparing for the next step: the group envisions equipping their robots with light or chemically sensitive neurons for controlling direction of robot’s movement as well as testing new designs of the backbone to enable a wider range of motions.

The results of the study can found in PNAS in the article called “Three-dimensionally printed biological machines powered by skeletal muscle.”

Year by year, robots become better and better at negotiating each time more complex social interactions with humans. However, much as their social intelligence has improved, these interactions still suffer from a lack of transparency. In other words, unlike humans, robots are not capable of understanding and explaining their actions in intentional terms, which prevents them from having more effective communication with humans. To the joy of robots and humans alike, this challenge is now addressed by the What You Say Is What You Did (WYSIWYD) project, launched earlier this year.

The project, coordinated by the SPECS lab at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, will develop an autobiographical memory that can store data streams obtained by the robot in the form of a consistent personal narrative of the interaction history. Furthermore, the researchers intend to devise a mechanism of conversion of this memory data into meaningful linguistic structures that can be subsequently expressed in speech and communicative actions through a specific channel dubbed WYSIWYD Robotese, thus improving mutual understanding between robots and humans.

WYSIWYD is an interdisciplinary effort that will draw from the fields of robotics, cognitive science, psychology and computational neuroscience. The project largely builds on the previous success of the efAA project, also coordinated by SPECS. WYSIWYD is scheduled to run for 3 years, and hopefully will bring about a qualitative change in human robot interaction and cooperation as well as unlock new application areas in robotics.

The main research platform for the project is everybody’s favourite iCub robot, developed by the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan, which is also one of the universities participating in the collaboration. iCub will be used in combination with another amazing piece of technology Reactable, an interactive table interface.

iCub has recently celebrated its 10^th anniversary. Watch the video below to see how the robot and its capabilities evolved throughout a decade.

The 3^rd Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems will be held this year from 30 July to 1 August in Milan. As has become a tradition, the three-day event, organised by the Convergent Science Network, will be hosted at a fantastic venue consistent with the spirit of the conference: the Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, one of the largest technology museums in Europe.

The conference will be packed with fascinating talks on a variety of topics related to the development of technologies at the intersection of living and artificial systems, including six plenary lectures from some of the most distinguished experts in the field. The plenary lectures will be complemented by nearly 20 short talks on diverse topics such as soft robotics, active sensing, neuromechanics and others.

You can find out more about the plenary speakers HERE and check out the full conference programme HERE.

This year, the Living Machines conference will be preceded by a one-day satellite event, hosted by the Italian Institute of Technology and consisting of a series of research-oriented workshops. Learn more about the workshops HERE.

We are looking forward to seeing you this year!

Crabs know their way around the ocean floor. These crawling creatures live in all the waters of the world, so if we want to learn something new about underwater exploration, it might be a good idea to take some cues from them. And this is precisely what a research team at the Korean Institute of Ocean Science and Technology did.

After two years of investigation, the team, led by Bong-Huan Jun, developed Crabster CR 200, a car-sized robot inspired by crustaceans and designed to survey shipwrecks and other areas of scientific interest.

But why bother creating a crab robot – although let’s admit it: a giant mechanical crab needs no justification – when we have some pretty advanced conventional ROVs that have already proven their reliability in most kinds of underwater exploration?

The main reason is that underwater exploration sometimes requires navigating in turbulent waters where strong currents sometimes reach 1.5 meters per second – enough to destabilise any conventional ROV. In addition, propulsion systems used in such vehicles tend to raise clouds of disturbed sediment, often completely obstructing the view of the ocean floor.

Source: KIOST

Hopefully, Crabster will become a game changer. Crawling on its six articulated legs, this sea monster can resist strong currents and does not disturb the ocean floor as much as other ROVs. Crabster’s four rear legs have four degrees of freedom, while the front two have six. And although the front legs and currently only used for walking, the researchers envision them as transformable manipulator arms, which can serve to grab objects of interest within 1.8 meters reach and store them in a front compartment, fashioned as an extendable crab mouth. With many legs Crabster also has many eyes: the robot is equipped with 11 optical cameras as well as with sonars – all of which makes him the real king of the ocean floor.

Crabster remains in the testing stage and, as you can see in the video, is still rather slow and cannot operate without a power cord. Last summer the robot was put to test in natural conditions for the first time, and soon we might see Crabster explore a real 12^th Century shipwreck in the Yellow Sea.

By analysing videos of 59 animals in steady motion, the researchers have discovered that most animal propulsive structures are surprisingly finely tuned as they bend at the tip in a way that shows very little variation across taxonomic groups, fluid medium and size – with the bending angle ranging from about 15° to 40°. No matter whether it is an insect, a bird, a fish, a mollusk or a cetacean, these newly discovered bending rules of propulsion apply to practically all of them.

The study suggests that this unique kinematic property of natural propulsors was independently reinvented again and again through evolutionary processes in entirely different groups of animals – a phenomenon that the authors of the study attribute to the advantages that bending propulsors imply for energy efficient thrust production.

The results of the study may open new possibilities in the design of biologically inspired propulsion systems, such as Robojelly, a Navy-funded robot jellyfish we featured in one of our previous posts, or its big brother Cyro, both of which have already confirmed the importance of flexible propulsors in underwater vehicles.