Mobile Flea-Like Robots Can Reach New Heights

A UC Berkeley electrical engineering graduate student has developed a technique that will make the potential of robots in engineering research leap.

Graduate student Sarah Bergbreiter makes small robots more mobile by designing them to jump like fleas, which can jump up to 200 times their body length.

Jumping robots can be used to latch onto larger hosts like animals or vehicles, the project Web site states.

Like a real flea, the bio-inspired robot has to be able to store the energy required for jumping and release it quickly when needed. Bergbeiter accomplished this by placing tiny electrical motors that stretch a hand-made rubber band only 9 microns wide into the robots.

The power for these motors is provided by solar cells.

The robotic fleas are 7 millimeters in size, and, according to early test outcomes, they can reach jumps of 200 millimeters vertically and more than twice that distance horizontally.

The plan is to downsize the robots to 1 millimeter, or actual flea size, scientists said.

“We have seen the different components work together, and the next step is to put everything together and see it actually jump,” Bergbreiter said.

The development of these flea robots is part of the larger Berkeley Smart Dust Project, which was set up to develop mobile networks of sensors distributed over a particular area that can communicate over long distances using mesh networks.

Mesh networks are networks that automatically make a connection using different stations and can repair damaged networks autonomously, making them more efficient than the static networks often used today.

One can think of these micro-robot networks as being a colony of termites with cell phones, scientists said.

Individually they are ineffective, but by communicating together there is potential intelligence, Bergbeiter said.

“I am really interested in what you need to get a group of dumb robots to communicate with each other and show intelligence,” she said.

Potential applications for the robots are widespread. In environmental research, they could be used as monitoring devices that are too small to scare animals away, thus not interfering with the environment being monitored.

For surveillance, stealth tracking devices are possible.

The robots’ main advantage in all possible applications is the fact that they are mobile systems instead of the widely used static systems, so they can adapt to certain circumstances or move towards a particularly interesting place, Bergbreiter said.

Future improvements include the combination of different types of movement into one robot, like walking and jumping, or flight that is initiated by jumping.

Scaling down the elements and making the robots more easily manufacturable is another goal, Bergbreiter said.

Tags: