Robot beak smiles with beard

A robot that uses beards to touch and distinguish different surfaces can open up new doors in sensor technology, helping to create devices that move in the dark or in a cramped place. The vision is useless.

Robot with beard

" It's like walking in a dark room with wide hands so you do not trip over something, " says neuroscientist Miriam Fend, a research fellow at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Fendor's robot is about 8 centimeters in diameter, with two beards in place. Each antennae is attached to a membrane, covered with a microphone. When the beard swept over an object, the membrane would be deformed, producing a signal that would then be magnified and recorded by a computer.

In the experiment, the robot mice discovered a walled space, groping around to find obstacles. When exposed to a soft surface, it is programmed to spin gently. If it hits a hard surface, it will change direction very quickly.

As a result, in every three of the four cases, it senses the correct surface and turns exactly as programmed.

" Although robots have previously used beards to avoid obstructions, track walls, and distinguish surfaces, Fend's work is the first to show that different surfaces can be distinguished in different ways. angle and distance , "said Associate Professor Mitra Hartmann at Northwestern University.

" This is an important step forward, since the classification of the object's characteristics depends on the angle of contact ," she said.

T. An ( Discovery )