Oh great! As if the upcoming robot apocalypse isn't scary enough, engineers have now created a cockroach-inspired robot that can't be squashed.
"Most of the robots at this particular small scale are very fragile," noted professor of mechanical engineering Liwei Lin of UC Berkeley, "If you step on them, you pretty much destroy the robot ... We found that if we put weight on our [cockroach] robot, it still more or less functions."
Made from a piezoelectric material, Lin's robot weighs about 20 to 65 milligrams, but can withstand being stepped on by a human - that's over one million times its own weight. It can move at speed of about 20 body lengths per second (nearing the speed of a scurrying cockroach) and carry loads up to 6 times its own weight.
#robot #cockroach #MechanicalEngineering #LiweiLin #piezoelectric #UCBerkeley
Video: Stephen McNally