GoQBot - a soft bodied crawling robot that resmebles catterpillar

In this era, with the vast development of technology and thinking of humans, electro mechanical machines called robots have been developing. These robots perform the tasks on their own or through assistance by programming.

caterpiller inspired robot

Following the same path, researchers created a robot, GoQBot. This robot is soft bodied, flexible and easy adaptable. GoQBot is a 10-centimeter-long with a hammer-shaped head and a silicone body embedded with metal coils. GoQBot curls itself into a loop and peels out at speeds faster than a half meter per second.

According to Satyandra Gupta, director of the Maryland Robotics Center at the University of Maryland in College Park, the crawling robots have many coordinated joints that slow their speed and at the same time they turn itself into a wheel to move easily.

GoQBot was designed to reproduce the functional of a caterpillar.

The robot was fitted with 5 infrared emitters along its side to track its motion through the latest high speed 3D tracking systems. Unlike caterpillars, as the surface of the robot is smooth, it uses ballistic rolling as a mode of transport.

Huai-ti Lin, a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford, Mass who created GoQBot says that robots similar to GoQBot may someday aid in search and rescue operations that require both crawling through tight, dangerous spaces and moving across flat ground.

Source: Science News