Tailbot: The Robot Lizard
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Recently, an interesting breakthrough has happened in the field of robotics, involving a robot called the “Tailbot”, which was designed after the natural design of a lizard. The interesting part is that a species known to have existed when dinosaurs walked the Earth has helped further the technological efficiency of robots. What an interdisciplinary team of researches at UC Berkley took from the lizard, is its ability to maintain balance while leaping using their tail.
In the future, the researchers hope the cutting-edge technology will help robots to execute missions. The new addition to robots is said to make them more durable and nimble at the same time, and enable them to function a lot better in hairy situations.
“Engineers quickly understood the value of a tail,” Thomas Libby, a team member and Berkeley graduate student in mechanical engineering, told the campus news center. “Robots are not nearly as agile as animals, so anything that can make a robot more stable is an advancement, which is why this work is so exciting.”
If you are wondering how in heck they could create a robot with a functioning tail, sort of like that of a lizards, here is how: the Tailbot is equipped with a little gyroscope which detects the angle of the bot, then sends the feedback to its artificial tail. After the information is sent, the tail quickly responds to the feedback and adjusts accordingly to maintain balance. Pretty cool right?
