{"id":952,"date":"2012-07-15T16:24:53","date_gmt":"2012-07-15T20:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=952"},"modified":"2017-07-28T16:32:44","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T20:32:44","slug":"bio-bots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2012\/07\/bio-bots\/","title":{"rendered":"Bio Bots"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"biobots\"<\/a>
Illustration by Gordon Studer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Listen to the night music of cockroaches.<\/p>\n

Listen to their tiny, spiny feet as they careen across the tiles in your kitchen. What do you hear? What can you learn? These hardy primordial creatures zip through cluttered spaces in utter darkness at human-equivalent speeds of up to 200 miles per hour. Yet you never hear them crashing headlong into things, even though the cockroach brain has only an infinitesimal fraction of the computing power of the average mammal’s. How do they manage this stupendous feat with such meager neural resources?<\/p>\n

“A cockroach has two head-mounted antennae,” explains Johns Hopkins roboticist Noah Cowan. “They’re only about as long as its body, but somehow they’re enough to allow it to react in time to obstacles.”<\/p>\n

Cowan, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, has been working with biologist Robert Full at UC Berkeley to understand the functions of the cockroach antenna-and apply these findings to robot design. Such antennae could help mini-bots move swiftly through earthquake-collapsed buildings, for example; they could even make Roomba-type cleaning bots better living room navigators.<\/p>\n

Cowan has been working on this for the past decade, at first to understand the main problem of how the sensory feedback from the antennae helps the cockroach adjust its course. But a few years ago, one of his graduate students suggested that the tiny hairs on each cockroach antenna might have more than a sensory function. “It turned out that there’s a mechanical aspect to the antenna that we had completely neglected,” says Cowan.<\/p>\n

The hairs are hinged in such a way that they tend to lie down against the tapering body of the antenna, and resist being pulled outward. The net effect is to enable the antenna to maintain its functional contact with a surface even as it skims along it at high speeds. “If it’s moving along a wall and there’s any roughness in the wall, which there usually is, the hairs get bound up in the roughness and cause the tip of the antenna, which is very floppy, to quickly curl back into a J-shape,” Cowan says.<\/p>\n

Like most engineers, he’s used to approaching design problems with a modular strategy, in which each part has its own separable function. “But here, the sensory apparatus has a mechanical component, and the mechanical component is a sensor, all integrated into one complete package,” he says. “Teasing that apart, with biological and engineering experiments, has been a lot of fun, and obviously the next step is to translate it into something that works on a real robot.”<\/p>\n

It’s just one of many projects at the Whiting School that take inspiration from the designs of living things-designs that have been worked out in the Darwinian trials and errors of millions, even billions, of generations. One could say that it’s all part of a massive, modern handoff of design responsibility, from the ponderous “blind watchmaker” of evolution to the faster and better-sighted tinkerers of the engineering world.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Flexible Fliers<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Indoor maneuverability is an issue not only for crawling bots but for flying ones, too. Aerial robots that can get around quickly and nimbly-say, inside a stricken nuclear reactor-would be in high demand. And once again, insects are a natural source of inspiration. “Flying insects are much better at this sort of thing than any current robot,” Cowan notes.<\/p>\n

What makes flying insects so maneuverable in tight spaces? A major factor is their flexibility-literally the flexibility of their bodies, which allows them to redirect the forces of their wing beats in a split-second. Cowan was on a sabbatical last year at the University of Washington at Seattle, and began working with a group of biologists, led by Tom Daniel, who study the flight dynamics of moths. They were able to demonstrate in experiments that when a moth flies, it automatically swivels its abdomen-representing about half its mass-in response to a changing visual scene, in order to quickly reorient its wing beats. “The visual-abdominal reflex we measured actually seems to be tuned for this purpose,” says Cowan.<\/p>\n

To turn this biological insight into a new technology, Cowan and his students have acquired a micro-drone, a helicopter-like vehicle with four evenly spaced propellers. Normally, an unmodified quad-rotor craft like this has somewhat clumsy flight dynamics. It is slow to maneuver and can lose stability relatively easily. The reason is that it has to achieve six degrees of motion (up-down, left-right, forward-backward, roll, pitch, and yaw) with only four flight control elements. “If it needs to go up and to the right, for example, it first has to turn the propeller speeds up on the left side and down on the right side, to pitch the craft to the right, and then it can throttle up all its propellers and move off in that new direction,” Cowan says.<\/p>\n

To improve stability and maneuverability, Cowan’s graduate student Alican Demir has slung the micro-drone’s battery pack-the analog of a moth’s food-stuffed abdomen-below the rest of the airframe, with a swivel and a small servomotor. “With one quick swing of this artificial abdomen, the craft can be reoriented, and even as it’s doing this, it can be cranking up all its propellers,” Cowan says. “In this way, a one- or two-second manuever becomes a split-second maneuver.” The team is just starting its flight tests of the mothlike craft, and Cowan sees plenty of engineering work ahead. “But the proof of concept is there already,” he says.<\/p>\n

Landing on Ceilings<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Insect Flight: Undergrad Tiras Lin \u201813 uses high-speed, high-resolution cameras to gain a new perspective on the mechanics of a painted lady butterfly’s flight pattern.<\/p>\n

Mechanical engineering Professor Rajat Mittal<\/a> is studying a different flexible flier: the butterfly. These insects can perform complex, intricate flying maneuvers, and, he says, “we’re starting to understand how their wing and body flexibility enable these aerial acrobatics.” He and his PhD student Lingxiao Zheng and Tiras Lin ’13 suspect that butterflies also assist their maneuvers by morphing their wings to alter aerodynamic forces and their moment-of-inertia. “That would be an amazing technology if we could figure out how to translate it from butterflies to engineering,” says Mittal.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/youtu.be\/azQeJLUWljc
\nWhat does Tiras Lin’s work tell us about how butterflies execute aerial maneuvers? Watch this video to find out.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even more amazing would be the ability to land upside down on a ceiling or overhang, as some insects do routinely. Last autumn, Lin received a Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award for his proposal to study how fruit flies accomplish this feat. Since then, he and Mittal have set up experiments to film the tiny insects in the act, using the lab’s high-speed cameras.<\/p>\n

It’s been a real challenge. For one thing, the fruit flies rarely land upside down; they generally want to land on the floor of their test chamber. “We’ve been trying to coax them, by putting a little bit of honey or vinegar or mashed fruit on the ceiling of the chamber,” Mittal says.<\/p>\n

But the hardest problem by far is that fruit flies are too small for easy high-speed imaging. As the shutter speed of a camera increases, less of the ambient flux of light is available to illuminate any one frame. “For high-speed photography, you need high-intensity illumination, which typically means a lot of heat,” Mittal says. The fruit flies they’re trying to film are about half the size of common house flies, and their tiny body mass gives them almost no ability to resist the sudden heat pulse from the high-wattage camera lamps. “The flies tend to burn up faster than we can image them,” he says.<\/p>\n

To get what they want, the engineers need to start the imaging just moments before the flies land, which is essentially a matter of luck. So Mittal and Lin have decided on a brute-force solution to the problem: They are setting up a fruit fly breeding colony, to ensure a near-limitless supply of the insects, and Lin is putting together a more automated fly-entry and imaging system in the observation chamber. “We’re trying to set up a system in which we can take hundreds, even thousands, of film sequences in a reasonable span of time, in the hope that a few of the sequences will show the perfect upside-down landings that we’re after,” Mittal says.<\/p>\n

So far they have acquired a few somewhat blurry sequences which hint that under-landing fruit flies first grab the ceiling with their forelimbs and then-like circus trapeze performers-swing their lower halves up until their rear limbs can get hold. But Mittal and Lin haven’t yet ruled out their alternative hypothesis, which is that the fruit flies first climb toward the ceiling in an aerial loop-the-loop, and use their momentum to land squarely upside down. “We just haven’t done enough research yet to draw firm conclusions,” Mittal says.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Self-Replicators<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Arguably the essence of life is its capacity for self-renewal and self-propagation. Attempts to imitate this capacity with silicon and metal represent one of the most ambitious areas of robotics. Useful self-replicating robots would represent not only a godlike achievement in an abstract, philosophical sense; they also would be extremely useful, transforming currently unfeasible giga-tasks into relatively easy ones. Need to dig an undersea tunnel from Brazil to Africa? Or construct a 30,000-mile-high space elevator? Or mine the ample minerals available on the moon? Or “terraform” Mars? In principle, robots that can make copies of themselves, using relatively simple parts-or even simple raw materials such as sand and iron ore-would be able to do such things. Humans would need only to get the process started by supplying one or two such bots, which would proliferate and do the rest.<\/p>\n

Hopkins mechanical engineering Professor Gregory Chirikjian<\/a> ’88 has been one of the pioneers in this field. In 2003, he and two students published the first description of an autonomous self-replicating robot: a several-feet-wide thing that could make functioning copies of itself-one copy every 135 seconds-from Lego building blocks, magnets, and simple optical sensors. Since then, Chirikjian, who is also the editor of the influential journal Robotica, has been overseeing the design and construction of larger and more elaborate self-replicators, which can assemble copies of themselves out of simpler materials.<\/p>\n

His current opus, he says, “occupies a large part of my small laboratory.” About 10 feet long and 3 feet high, it looks a bit like a scaled-down shipyard gantry crane. It includes tracks, two towers, and a grasping system that can pick up parts and place them accurately in three dimensions.<\/p>\n

Principally constructed by recent PhD student Matt Moses, and undergraduate Hans Ma ’12, this ambitious device is essentially a learning tool. Engineers use such machines to better understand the key principles of useful robotic self-replication- so that they know where they’re going and how far they’ve come. These principles include versatility (the range of tasks that such a bot can perform), relative complexity (the ratio of the finished bot’s complexity to the complexity of its parts), robustness (tolerance to errors it makes), and efficiency (how fast and how cheaply it can reproduce). The ideal self-replicating robot would be highly versatile, made up of relatively simple parts and materials, highly error-tolerant-and, of course, much more efficient than humans, who need two complementary specimens to get the reproduction process going, and even then take at least a couple of decades to produce new working versions (at great expense, if these new versions are to be of much use).<\/p>\n

The dream-or nightmare, if you prefer-of self-replicating robots that draw on soil and water and sunlight for sustenance, and breed faster than insects (a robot that reproduces once per hour could go from one copy to 17 million copies within a day), is still decades off. But Chirikjian and his colleagues already have made surprisingly long strides toward this goal. “The robots we’re making now can manufacture some of their constituent parts by squirting liquids into molds, having the parts form, and then picking up the parts and assembling them into complex structures,” he says.<\/p>\n

In the near term, he sees self-replicator bots contributing in small but important ways, such as the self-repair of buildings or bridges. Farther out he sees at least one giga-scale goal as doable. In a 2002 paper in the IEEE\/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Chirikjian and two students, Yu Zhou and Jackrit Suthakorn, described in detail a bot-based lunar mining scheme. “When self-replicating robotic factories take hold,” they wrote, “the moon will be transformed into an industrial dynamo. The resulting refined materials and energy that will be produced on the moon will then provide capabilities for the exploration and colonization of space that could never exist otherwise.”<\/p>\n

Little Self-Assemblers<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Bots that self-assemble down at nanoscale-as DNA and some proteins do-could be at least as useful. In the laboratory of Rebecca Schulman<\/a>, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, these nanobots don’t just take their inspiration from DNA, they are made from DNA-synthetic DNA strands that have been strung together like sausage links from their constituent nucleotide molecules. “In this context, we think of DNA not as parts of living things but as parts of useful things to build with,” says Schulman.<\/p>\n

One of the key properties of single-stranded DNA is its ability to bind to a counterpart, “complementary” strand. Cytosine (C) bases on a DNA strand are complementary to guanines (G), and adenines (A) are complementary to thymines (T); thus a strand with the code CGAT would bind tightly to any GCTA strand. It’s a simple evolutionary trick that enables DNA-based organisms to replicate efficiently and with high fidelity. But for Schulman’s purposes, DNA’s tunable complementarity makes it a versatile nanoscale Velcro.<\/p>\n

The basic idea here is to use scaffold structures of double-stranded DNA that have sticky, naked (single-stranded) DNA segments in certain places, for example at each end. The basic structures of these DNA “tiles” can be simple, two-ended lengths of DNA, folded-over triangles with three sticky segments, four-ended crosses, and so forth. The right mix of these structures and their sticky bits-when they’re all placed in water and stirred-will act as a sort of self-assembling jigsaw puzzle and arrange itself into a pre-designed shape. “In this way, we can assemble complicated structures with just a few kinds of simple building blocks,” says Schulman. “And in principle, these structures will reassemble again even if torn in half, provided that their building blocks are available.”<\/p>\n

Like Chirikjian’s bulkier self-replicobots, these DNA-based structures so far are mainly tools for learning more about the processes of self-assembly. But another of Schulman’s projects is closer to finding real-world use. In this case, instead of trying to make complex structures with DNA-based elements, she and her students are using them to self-assemble simple wirelike strands that connect two fixed points, for example on a circuit board. The strands could then become a scaffold for attaching electric-current-conducting metal atoms or other useful elements. “This would be a way, for example, to self-assemble circuits that are smaller than can be made with current computer-chip lithography techniques,” Schulman says. “Or we could use it to connect things that we don’t otherwise know how to connect; all we’d have to do is put DNA-bindable labels on the start and end points, and add the building blocks.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Neuromorphs<\/strong><\/h2>\n

If you really want to get an eyeful of what the future of technology holds in store- and we’re back at human scale now-check out one of the Web pages for the laboratory of electrical engineering Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings. There’s a short video loop of a pair of metal robotic legs running-running! -on a treadmill. To achieve this, Etienne-Cummings and his colleagues built a computer chip that mimicked the “central pattern generator” signals that spinal neurons use to control walking in mammals. They even made it robust enough to adjust to obstacles and stumbles.<\/p>\n

For the past few years, initially with help from a DARPA grant and now mainly with National Institutes of Health and Office of Naval Research funding, Etienne-Cummings has been trying to apply this technology not so much to make humanoid running bots but to make bots that help injured humans run again, or at least walk. In a way it’s the ultimate bio-inspired robotic design, for it is meant not just to mimic biology but to mesh with it.<\/p>\n

“In a typical spinal cord injury, the link from the brain to the spinal cord is broken, but the link from the spinal cord to the muscles is still intact, even though the muscles may be somewhat atrophied,” Etienne-Cummings explains. “So our idea is to use electrical stimulation to activate the leg muscles via the spinal cord, as well as a light mechanical exoskeleton to provide extra support.”<\/p>\n

He and his colleagues already have shown that they can stimulate a paraplegic cat’s hind-leg muscles, via spinal cord neurons, to enable the cat to run for hours without tiring. The next steps are to add the exoskeleton-the easy part-as well as sensory feedback, which is definitely the hard part. Natural motion, especially motion that involves contact with the ground and fine control of balance, requires a high degree of sensation, but reproducing the complex sensory feedback of touch and pain -something that even a big-brained human child takes years to learn-is really a fledgling area of robotics. Still, Etienne-Cummings is one of the pioneers in the field, and has long been working with Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Steven Hsiao on the problem. “Our idea initially is to use external sensors to stimulate the spinal cord or even the brain, to restore sensations of limbs and their positions and movements,” Etienne-Cummings says.<\/p>\n

Could one use such technology to make 60 mph bionic humans?<\/p>\n

Etienne-Cummings laughs. “You could make lots of bulky, power-hungry machines that carry a person along that fast, but our idea is to create something that’s as passive and integrated and efficient as possible at restoring natural function,” he says. “One thing you learn in this field is that biological systems are already very efficient; it can be hard to improve on their design.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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