Robert Full devotes his TED talk, The secrets of nature's grossest creatures, to the extraordinary biology of the cockroach. Roboticists can learn an incredible amount of tricks and techniques from this disgusting insect.
Full says that the secret of a good robot is robustness. A cockroach, and by extension a robot, performs at its best when it is robust. Cockroach legs allow the creatures to self stabilize without using any of their brain power.
The talk is full of examples of roaches overcoming new obstacles placed in their paths. When synthetic grass is placed across the field as a wall the insect body twists between the blades to get across the obstacle.
A technique called rapid inversion allows the creatures to run to the end of the thin plate, flip onto the bottom of the plate and run back. Roaches can run upside down and perform a gyration to climb up a pole.
Robust systems also efficiently use their resources, and can perform more than one function with the same resource. Wings on a roach are used to fly but also to right themselves when flipped upside down. Legs are used to propel but also to adhere and to jump.
Robust systems are also fail safe and fault tolerant. Several examples are shown of cockroaches climbing and moving without feet and then without legs. Even on two legs out of six the roach can still adapt and move itself in a modified gait.
Robert Full and his colleagues at the Fearing Lab at UC Berkeley have used this information to develop DASH. The robot is a small origami mechanism built from a laser cut exoskeleton that can be assembled in less than fifteen minutes.
DASH - dynamically autonomous sprawled hexapods, are shown in the talk performing many of the same behaviors as cockroaches. The discussion ends with a slide showing the possible reasons that audience members might want a swarm of cockroach inspired robots coming for them.
Robert Full is a wonderful speaker and the sheer volume of examples and behaviors in this demonstration is inspiring. Pairing a biologist with robot scientists is a great idea and will no doubt lead to more amazing robots in the near future.