Hunmminbirds can fly through tiny gaps

 

Image curtesy of Jerome Gawe.

Joel Kontinen

High-speed cameras have revealed how hummingbirds negotiate their way through tiny gaps while in flight, which happens much too quickly for the human eye to properly see. 

The findings could inform new techniques for flying robots.

Marc Badger at the University of California, Berkeley says that !Hummingbirds feed on nectar and have to fly through tiny gaps in cluttered foliage as they flit from flower to flower. 

“When a dominant male would come and chase an intruder away, that intruder would fly through a bush,” he says. “And it’s sort of like ‘wow, how are they doing that?’ It looks like it literally just teleported to the other side of the bush.”

Badger and colleagues constructed an enclosure with a portal between two compartments to study this behaviour in four Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna), with wingspans of around 12 centimetres and a mass between 4 and 5 grams. A flower-shaped feeder provided a sip of sugar solution in the opposite compartment to the bird each time it flew through the gap, encouraging it back to the other side.

The researchers set up high-speed cameras recording at 500 frames a second to film the birds as they passed through, and a computer program tracked the position of each bird’s bill and wing tips. The gap between the compartments was gradually reduced until it was just 6 centimetres wide, or half the hummingbirds’ wingspan.”

Yes, humminbids have intelligently designed wings. 

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did,  He did very well.,  

 

Source:

Matthew Sparkes, 2023, Hummingbirds have two amazing ways to fly through tiny gaps. New Scientist 9 November

A dog can beat a robot dog

 

Youtube Screenshot

Joel Kontinen

A  dog that is intelligently designed can walk on unfamiliar and hard-to-master terrain, such as grass. Now, scientist have done the same with robotic  dogs, 

Now, Sergey Levine at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have demonstrated that a robot using a kind of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning can work out how to walk in about 20 minutes in several different environments, such as a grass lawn, a layer of bark, a memory foam mattress and a hiking trail.

Intelligent design in nature is so evident that it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny it. In recent years, researchers have copied many amazing designs they have seen in the animal kingdom.

This isn’t something that Darwin’s blind watchmaker, natural selection, works, in that the dogs stride may be useful in microrobots. .

Source:  

Wilkins, Alex. 2022.  Robot dog learns to walk on tough terrain in just 20 minutes New Scientist 26 August

Robots could use intelligently designed wings

 

Image courtesy of PjrStudio/Alamy.

Joel Kontinen

 Biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Now, scientist have said that small robots could get more lift when they hover by moving their wings in a “treading water” motion instead of flapping them like hovering insects do.

In an experiment with a robotic wing, Swathi Krishna at the University of Southampton in the UK and Karen Mulleners at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, found that flying micro-robots could hover up to 50 per cent more efficiently if they used a wing. 

Source:

 Padavic-Callaghan,  Karmela. 2022. Hovering robots could get more lift by 'treading water' in the air New Scientist 11 August

Emu inspire robot uses less energy to run

 

Joel Kontinen

How do you make a robot run faster?

The solution is to use emu type legs. For instance,  “Alexander Badri-Spröwitz at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues have done away with the usual approach where every joint in a robotic limb” has that resembles the gait of an emu.

Emus are fast runners and giving their ability to robots makes the robots super fast. . 

biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Design in nature is so obvious that it’s practically impossible to deny it.

Source: 

 Sparkes Matthew, 2022,  Watch emu-inspired robot legs that use less energy to run New Scientist 16 March. 

 

Spider legs build webs without the brain’s help – providing a model for future robot limbs

 

Image courtesy of Didier Descouens - CC BY-SA 3.0.

Joel Kontinen

Emeritos Professor Fritz Vollrath of the University Of Oxford has shown that in a study with his collegue Thiemo Krink, spider legs build webs without the brain’s help, which would be a model for future robots.

"Arachnophobes often cite spiders’ unpredictable movement as the basis of their fear, pointing out how each spindly leg seems to lift, flex and probe with a menacing degree of autonomy.

Perhaps unsettlingly, my colleague Thiemo Krink and I have conducted research that reveals that each one of a spider’s legs does indeed enjoy a certain independence from the brain – especially in the complex task of web-building.

Our study has shown that spider legs have “minds of their own”, constructing webs without the oversight of the spider’s brain. This has important implications for the field of robotics, which may take inspiration from this example of decentralised intelligence to build similarly autonomous robot limbs."

 In their study Krink and Vollrath  “observed the common garden spider Araneus diadematus, a creature familiar to us all – both suspended in our back yards.”

 The Roboticists call this tactic  morphological computing. According to vollrath, the common garden spider has been using this for over a hundred million years.

Source: 

 Vollrath, Fritz. 2021. Spider legs build webs without the brain’s help – providing a model for future robot limbs.  spider legs build webs without the brain’s help – providing a model for future robot limbs . The Conversation 10 February.