Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Sunday, September 20, 2009
The shape of robots
(I know, off-topic again…)
Finally scientists come to their senses and skip the notion that robots need to look like human beings, and the obvious drawbacks of that (slow, clumsy, large, etc). Now they rather look at the task at hand and how robots need to be shaped for that. Two examples:
- Secrets Of Insect Flight Revealed: Modeling The Aerodynamic Secrets Of One Of Nature's Most Efficient Flyers
- Mimicking Insects to Avoid Sinking Using Surface Tension
What people seem to forget or ignore is that e.g. insects are extremely optimized for their respective biotopes, evolved during millions of years, hence anything that would make the insect power inefficient or badly adapted have been ironed out long time ago. Spider-like robots would be very practical for complex surfaces, etc.
This is one of those “I told you so, 20 years ago”, but as blogging didn’t exist then, I have no proof of the matter.
