Cockroach Robot Flips Itself With Insect-Inspired Wings

For the last several years, we’ve been following closely (and somewhat uncomfortably) the development of robot cockroaches. Depending on your perspective, it’s either good news or bad news that they seem to be spreading. As roboticists graduate from the original home of the robot cockroach at UC Berkeley, they’re taking roachbot research everywhere.

Chen Li was a researcher at Berkeley’s Poly-PEDAL Lab and Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, where he gave little legged robots cockroach-inspired shells to help them push through obstacles. Li now has his own lab at Johns Hopkins University: the Terradynamics Lab studies “movement science at the interface of biology, robotics, and physics.” At IROS 2016, he presented a paper demonstrating a new trick for legged robots with shells: Ground-based dynamic self-righting, or flipping over using wing covers like a real insect does.

Li’s earlier research on small legged robots with rounded shells showed that the shells helped the robots get through obstacle courses, but because of the shape of the shells, if the robots flipped upside-down, they got stuck that way. Real cockroaches don’t have this problem,…[Read more]