*Do they have fifteen-dollar Vodafones on board?
http://www.citris-uc.org/publications/newsletters/current_newsletter#article-7340
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Paul Birkmeyer, the graduate student who is spearheading DASH’s design, was first inspired to develop inexpensive and durable robots that could be dumped by the hundreds onto disaster sites. These could work, even before the adhering gecko feet are perfected, by releasing them at the highest point on the damaged building, and then letting them work their way downhill. The robots could assist rescue workers seeking out survivors of natural disasters. A batch of them, equipped with CO2 detectors, could thoroughly cover a dangerous building and investigate spaces too narrow for human rescuers to enter.
Birkmeyer, a graduate student at UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, looked to nature for mobile inspiration. The six-leg design exhibits the "spring loaded inverted pendulum" used by cockroaches to propel themselves forward and climb over obstacles, says Fearing. "That insight was Birkmeyer’s key to getting DASH to move so nicely," he says.
"The age of robots will have arrived," says Fearing, "when you can buy one for ten dollars that does something really useful." And the next-generation DASH, the ten-dollar cardboard gecko-roaches, may mark that day. The cheap little bots could also do more mundane domestic jobs like washing hard-to-reach windows, sweeping cobwebs out of high corners, or conducting search-and-poison missions on, say, rodent nests.
The electronics in DASH takes advantage of the tremendous progress in electronics and MEMS sensors of the last 20 years. Each robot carries a stamp-sized battery and a single motor and can easily be equipped with other electronics like a cell-phone camera, standard sensors, and Bluetooth wireless. But the big innovation here is in the simple way the robot moves and, eventually, the way it will climb.
"Two of the three main ingredients for a good, inexpensive, sensing robot are already in place," Fearing says. "We have powerful, light, inexpensive computation. And we have great affordable sensors. All we need now is to solve the mobility challenge; we need something inexpensive that moves reliably over all kinds of terrain."
The next step is to give DASH the power of verticality. And for that, Fearing’s team is looking for inspiration at the fancy footwork of geckos....
