BioInspired! So What? Now What!

“Nature is a rich source of design ideas,” notes Bruno Siciliano, robotics researcher and dissemination officer for EURON. “Nature has already solved a lot of the problems that robotics researchers encounter, so it is a good place to go for ideas.”

The article describes various robots inspired by nature, such as the Robot Fish (University of Essex, UK), the Anna Konda (SINTEF, Norway) and three multi-legged robots Amos, Morpheus and TED (Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems) used to study neural perception and networking.  Other research involves game-playing, involving sensor technology, rapid processing and fast reactions.  Examples include Robota (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) and e-Puck.  Robots designed for entertainment include Sony's Aibo.

This article was the last in a series:

• Taming Europe's Robots
• Your robotic friend, the humanoid robot
• A robot in every home?

A fifth article, Swarm-bots could boldly go where no man has gone before, describes the application of swarm theory to robotics.