Achievement

Using dynamic similarity, IGERT Trainee Duncan Haldane extracted features from one of the world’s fastest runners, the American cockroach. The resulting robot, VelociRoACH (Velocity Robotic Autonomous Crawling Hexapod), can run 27 times the length of its body in a single second and stands with respect to relative speed as the world’s fastest legged robot. VelociRoACH is different from most other robots in that it has a flexible body as opposed to a rigid metal frame. Like an insect’s exoskeleton, the robot’s body is made of rigid and flexible segments. These segments were made using the Smart Composite Microstructures process which allows robots to be made in a matter of hours using inexpensive materials. The robot design process showed that using dynamic similarity to determine scaling factors from animal data to set robot parameters can result in highly effective robots that one day can assist us in search-and-rescue.