Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

Biomimetic tactile target acquisition, tracking and capture

Good performance in unstructured/uncertain environments is an ongoing problem in robotics; in biology, it is an everyday observation. Here, we model a particular biological system - hunting in the Etruscan shrew - as a case study in biomimetic robot design. These shrews strike rapidly and accurately after gathering very limited sensory information from their whiskers; we attempt to mimic this performance by using model-based simultaneous discrimination and localisation of a 'prey' robot (i.e. by using strong priors to make sense of limited sensory data), building on our existing low-level models of attention and appetitive behaviour in small mammals. We report performance that is comparable, given the spatial and temporal scale differences, to shrew performance, and discuss what this study reveals about biomimetic robot design in general. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

CRICKET: Cryogenic Reservoir Inventory by Cost-Effective Kinetically Enhanced Technology

NASA PROGRAMMATIC CHALLENGE: Locate hidden water ice in the darkest, coldest places on the moon using dozens of simple, autonomous robots. CONCEPTUAL SOLUTION: Use multiple small, autonomous bots to search for hidden water ice in permanently shadowed regions of the surface of the moon. Bots will locate and tag hidden water ice for follow up missions.Technical Basis for proposed solution: use of emerging and maturing technologies - MEMS, Cubesats, Sensor nets, integrated devices will minimize cost risk and maximize return. Benefits: Cricket will enable human exploration through in-situ resource utilization: Cricket will demonstrate a distributed constellation to achieve a key NASA goal of novel uses of commercially available technologies. Cricket will reignite public interest in lunar exploration through a sustained human, and robotic, presence on the moon. Technical Approach: The cricket constellation has three members: the "queen"; the "hive" and the "cricket" foragers. The queen transports the hive an its crickets to the moon. The hive lands on the surface and disperses the crickets (there may be more than one species of cricket). The crickets then use the hive as a communications and recharging hub. Each cricket hosts algorithms that allow it to explore its surroundings and monitor its power state - something like a lunar Roomba - and return for recharging. If they are lost due to power or surface condition problems, replacements can carry out the hive tasks. The two most successful types of bio-inspired algorithms (BIAs) are evolutionary algorithms and swarm-based algorithms which are inspired by the natural evolution and collective behavior in animals.The evolution of the idea is summarized in Table 1 and Figure 1. NIAC context: This system integrates key elements from other NIAC efforts; it uses them and extends them into a meaningful whol

Braking and Body Angles Control of an Insect-Computer Hybrid Robot by Electrical Stimulation of Beetle Flight Muscle in Free Flight

While engineers put lots of effort, resources, and time in building insect scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) that fly like insects, insects themselves are the real masters of flight. What if we would use living insect as platform for MAV instead? Here, we reported a flight control via electrical stimulation of a flight muscle of an insect-computer hybrid robot, which is the interface of a mountable wireless backpack controller and a living beetle. The beetle uses indirect flight muscles to drive wing flapping and three major direct flight muscles (basalar, subalar and third axilliary (3Ax) muscles) to control the kinematics of the wings for flight maneuver. While turning control was already achieved by stimulating basalar and 3Ax muscles, electrical stimulation of subalar muscles resulted in braking and elevation control in flight. We also demonstrated around 20 degrees of contralateral yaw and roll by stimulating individual subalar muscle. Stimulating both subalar muscles lead to an increase of 20 degrees in pitch and decelerate the flight by 1.5 m/s2 as well as an induce an elevation of 2 m/s2.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, supplemental video: https://youtu.be/P9dxsSf14LY . Cyborg and Bionic Systems 202

Soft-Material Robotics

There has been a boost of research activities in robotics using soft materials in the past ten years. It is expected that the use and control of soft materials can help realize robotic systems that are safer, cheaper, and more adaptable than the level that the conventional rigid-material robots can achieve. Contrary to a number of existing review and position papers on soft-material robotics, which mostly present case studies and/or discuss trends and challenges, the review focuses on the fundamentals of the research field. First, it gives a definition of softmaterial robotics and introduces its history, which dates back to the late 1970s. Second, it provides characterization of soft-materials, actuators and sensing elements. Third, it presents two general approaches to mathematical modelling of kinematics of soft-material robots; that is, piecewise constant curvature approximation and variable curvature approach, as well as their related statics and dynamics. Fourth, it summarizes control methods that have been used for soft-material robots and other continuum robots in both model-based fashion and model-free fashion. Lastly, applications or potential usage of soft-material robots are described related to wearable robots, medical robots, grasping and manipulation

Identifying the Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Alternative Reproductive Tactics in Simulated Robot Colonies

Alternative reproductive tactics (ARTs), phenomena in which individuals within one sex adopt different tactics for accessing mates or raising offspring, are commonly observed in all major taxa. In order to study the ecological conditions for the emergence of ARTs, we developed an embodied evolution framework incorporating ecological features, such as body size and energy maintenance, where male and female robotic agents naturally face both intersexual and intrasexual interactions for survival and reproduction. Each agent has a decision neural network with extrinsic and intrinsic sensory inputs to choose one of four basic behaviors: mating, foraging, approaching and waiting. The reproductive success depends on the body size and the energy level of both male and female upon mating and it is assumed that only female carries the reproduction cost, as in nature the cost of male’s sperm production is negligible relative to that of female’s eggs. We performed simulation experiments in environments with different conditions (food density, reproductive cost, and male-female ratio) and found ARTs emerged both in males and females. Males evolved three kinds of alternative tactics - fixed genetically distinct ARTs (dominant and sneaker males that differ in body size and the tactic for getting access to female), conditionally flexible ARTs (individuals change tactics according to body size), and mixed ARTs (combination of genetically fixed and conditionally flexible ARTs). Females evolved to have two genetically distinct ARTs (quality oriented female, QoF, and number oriented female, NoF), where they increase fitness either by offspring quality or quantity. Analysis of the results confirms the experimental notions that male genetically fixed ARTs are strongly affected by intensity of sexual selection, male conditionally flexible ARTs are significantly affected by competition level, and female ARTs are mainly affected by food density. Analysis of ESS shows male ARTs are evolutionary stable with negative frequency dependent selection and female ARTs are evolutionary stable with both frequency and density dependent selection. To our knowledge, this study is the first to show the emergence of ARTs in both male and female from initially continuous characteristics in a simulated embodied evolution framework. The evolved ARTs are quite similar to the ARTs found in nature and provide insights about how interactions between the sexes are affected by and affect the evolution of ARTs within each sex. This framework is flexible enough to further analyze species of different sexual mechanisms (hermaphrodite, androdioecious, gynodioecious, etc.) and can be used as an important tool to understand the ecology of social interaction.Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate Universit

Basilisk Lizard Inspired Methods for Locomotion on Granular and Aquatic Media with Robotic Applications

abstract: The Basilisk lizard is known for its agile locomotion capabilities on granular and aquatic media making it an impressive model organism for studying multi-terrain locomotion mechanics. The work presented here is aimed at understanding locomotion characteristics of Basilisk lizards through a systematic series of robotic and animal experiments. In this work, a Basilisk lizard inspired legged robot with bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion capabilities is presented. A series of robot experiments are conducted on dry and wet (saturated) granular media to determine the effects of gait parameters and substrate saturation, on robot velocity and energetics. Gait parameters studied here are stride frequency and stride length. Results of robot experiments are compared with previously obtained animal data. It is observed that for a fixed robot stride frequency, velocity and stride length increase with increasing saturation, confirming the locomotion characteristics of the Basilisk lizard. It is further observed that with increasing saturation level, robot cost of transport decreases. An identical series of robot experiments are performed with quadrupedal gait to determine effects of gait parameters on robot performance. Generally, energetics of bipedal running is observed to be higher than quadrupedal operation. Experimental results also reveal how gait parameters can be varied to achieve different desired velocities depending on the substrate saturation level. In addition to robot experiments on granular media, a series of animal experiments are conducted to determine and characterize strategies exhibited by Basilisk lizards when transitioning from granular to aquatic media.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Mechanical Engineering 201