Boffins decide what world really needs is indestructible robot cockroaches If there is one thing the world doesn't need, more cockroaches would surely be it. Not so, according to a collaborative group of boffins from China and the University of California at Berkeley, who have pooled their efforts to create a near-indestructible, super-fast, cockroach-sized robot. While some of our readers may now …
I understand that one of the most effective anti-cockroach devices is a gecko, although I doubt metal ones wold be all that nutritious.
It is all very well being able to survive being stepped on by a trainer clad human, but I bet Tiddles, the family cat and Butch the family boxer dog would deal with it in no time.
The device is not withstanding the whole weight of a human. particularly one wearing a soft soled shoe. The stress within the device has to be within the elastic limit of the materials, to avoid damage. Even allowing for the weight of the human taken by the floor adjacent to the device, only a few grammes of the humans weight is taken in deforming the structure of the device, before the device is merely sandwiched between shoe and floor. If the device had been crawling over a matchstick, at the time, the results might have been rather more damaging
That's the entire point. Wasn't it Aesop who had the thing about bending like the willow rather than standing strong like the oak? The best way to handle large forces usually isn't to try to build something incredibly strong and rigid that can just shrug them off, but rather to build something that somehow flexes or deflects the force so that the actual stresses that need to be coped with are much smaller. A large part of the article is spent explaining why small robots with rigid parts are fragile, but this one that flexes is much more survivable.
So yes, the device absolutely is withstanding the whole weight of a human. It does so by deforming to keep stress on all important parts low, instead of trying to directly support the entire weight with rigid structures.
> Have you checked your power supplies?
Not sure what you mean, but something so small and light having to carry it's own power supply can't possibly require much voltage/amperage to work. Meaning that a simple car battery would be able to twist them into a donut for hours.
The resemblance between their piezo-foil and a cockroach is is even less canny than that between me and Arnold Schwarzenegger. No quantity of visual cues (squirreling cockroaches or posing bodybuilders) can overcome that obvious gap in appearance, capabilities, and attractiveness. Terminate that project now!
so some brave humans have decided to make it their life goal.
...
you know, this might actually work. Fuck the climate change, overpopulation / famine / economic collaps / 2 degree temp rise and CO2 emissions, by 2050 we will have wiped ourselves out one way or the other, and the project 'human' will have been shut down, permanently.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
