Whyfore

Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..

Whyfore?

There are times when inspiration comes, not from the craziest new gadget, but from something as simple as looking into the mind of a cat and having a good laugh. Kernal assists me in this fashion daily.

The feline in the video above makes me wonder if Schrödinger came up with his morbid and disturbing cat analogy after noticing that cats see the state of objects very differently than we do. They don’t see them as constant when not observed directly. After having seen what is in a box, if you move the box a foot, they will wonder anew, what might now be in the box?

In the below video, we have a cat absolutely consumed by the question of where the water goes when it flushes the toilet. The focus of their curiosity is legendary. What strikes me is how the owners always seem to feel the need to interrupt. The cat always has the same reaction. It looks at them like, “What are you laughing at? Do You mind? I’m trying to do this thing…”

Quorum Sensing and Swarmbot Design

 

In this Ted Talk video, Bonnie Bassler speaks about the inter and intra species communications between bacteria and how central they are to life and death on a greater scale. Bacteria were the designers of cellular communication, organization, and cooperation that are used throughout life on the planet. After unimaginable generations of evolution, they have achieved some very effective methods; methods which could be applied to anything from communication and cooperation between tiny swarms of robots, to replicationg and self regulating software routines, traffic regulation, automated disaster response….

She is focusing on Quorum sensing, which essentially refers to chemical hormones, both general and species specific, released by the bacteria in order to give them information about things like their population density and diversity. She has been working on synthetic false signals that will either inhibit or assist in quorum sensing in order to create a new class of antibiotic and probiotic treatments.

corm-sensor

Robot Penguins: Festo does it again

 

Pengiun Robot - Festo

Pengiuns sure do seem to be getting a lot of play in recent years. Festo has now targeted them for their latest aquatic and lighter than air robotics. They seem to be doing two versions of these, just like they did with their Robotic Jelly Fish. in their latest promotional video, they show off aquatic penguin robots which use sonar to navigate and communicate, some Mylar, lighter than air penguins reminiscent of that awesome Fin-Fish by LaChLuVe last year, and several other projects involving biomimicry and affordable rapid prototyping.

Update: And more footage of the robotic sea penguins:

Don’t Piss Off Crows (mutually beneficial synanthropy)

I’ve always had a great admiration for crows. While other animals retreat from society, or scuttle around at night, crows embrace it and take an interest in finding ways to make the system work for them. I’ve witnessed them just down the street from my home using cars to crack walnuts. Most of the ways they have adapted society to their needs weren’t taught to them by people, they figured it out and taught their friends. 

Joshua Klein has shown himself to be smarter than the average crow, and if this works, the average person, by taking things one step further. He designed a vending machine for crows. They put in a coin, it spits out a peanut. He calls it mutually beneficial synanthropy. In the video (another great TED Talk) Klein explains how the system trains the crows. I don’t think this will be necessary. Once the first few learn how to use it, the whole continent will know in short order. Sure, it starts with picking up loose change they find lying around, but pretty soon you have murders of crows mugging people in dark alleys for their change so they can get their peanut fix. 

The crazy thing about crows is they are smart enough not only to figure out how this works, but also to teach their friends. They are natural pack rats and are attracted to coins anyway. There are a lot of crows in the world, and a lot of loose change. Klein professes an interest in advancing the project to teach crows how to pick up trash or other beneficial tasks, but I’m still back at the vending machine concept. The idea really is brilliant. I wonder what else we could teach them to do?

Yessss….everything will go according to plan…*cackle*

Robotic Drummer

Back to the cute robots:

This little drummer robot rolls about looking like a little crab, all the while tapping and tweetling out his own little theme music. Next time I’m out on the warpath, I’m taking a troop of these little guys as my fifers, to sir the troops and strike fear into my enemies. Well…maybe not fear, but something.
The little guy reminds me of a similarly impressive organic counterpart:

Slow Prototyping with Bees

Rapid prototypers are falling in price, but are still expensive to use, and the field of swarm robotics continues to work on making better bots with more useful emergent behavior, but today, the hardest working hives on the planet are still organic. Tomas Libertiny made a form for his hive in the shape of a vase and then let the bees do the rest. It took 40,000 of the little ladies a week to make the vase. The materials are free, as the bees gather them themselves, and even better, they work for queen and country. I was spoke with a beekeeper this morning who has been working on something similar, and others have made use of the concept in the past, inclding Garnett Puett, who twenty years ago apparently put a queen bee in a life sized cast of his wife and let them sculpt a work known as Apiscaryatid, but I have yet to see a picture. Hilary Berseth has some wonderful slow prototyping work that can be seen here.

I think it would also be fun to use a lost wax process to cast the final product in a more permanent material. Next thing you know, the Danish will be using slow prototyping termites to make their clogs.

Update: It looks like Libertini is still at it. He has taken on a project much like Apiscaryatid, creating a life size figure of Jesus in a glass case entitled Unbearable Lightness. He started with a mesh small enough to trap the queen within, but large enough to allow the workers through. The bees built the honeycomb, filled it with honey, and then removed the honey when they were later relocated, leaving just the honeycomb structure behind. Why he chose the religious iconography I don’t know, but it scares the beeJesus out of me.

And some video as well:

Wind Powered Machines, the Strandbeesten

When it comes to artists and inventors, Theo Jansen is my unrivaled favorite. Theo would probably object to me putting his work into the perfection category, since he sees better than anyone the endless adjustments and innovations tomorrow will bring for his creations, but I think they qualify. When we look around us, we tend to consider ourselves the most evolved creatures on the planet, because we are intelligent, and we are in control, but in the eyes of evolution, that is simply not the case. There are animals on this planet that have gone nearly unchanged for tens of millions of years, not because they are inferior, but because they have reached a point where they are perfectly evolved to survive in their respective environments. Theo Jansen creates creatures out of tubes and air hoses, check valves and plastic bottles, and then sets them loose on the beach, where they are powered by the wind. The Strandbeesten walk, run, hunker down, and avoid danger, all with a brain made of coke bottles.

Festo Air Jelly

Predating the LaChLuVe fish is this Air Jelly made by Festo, a German automation company. The unifying goal of these creations is to achieve neutral buoyancy. From there, propulsion becomes as effortless as it would in zero gravity. This jelly uses helium for buoyancy amd when deflated, weighs in at 1.3 kG. A  Li-poly battery as its only power source, and a series of gears, shafts, and cranks power the arms. It can be steered by control of a pendulum on the underside.

1.3kg gets you a lot more to work with than it used to.

Related Posts:

Festo Air Jellyish

Penguin Robots, Air and Sea

LaChLuVe Air Fish Captivates Airship Regatta

Last week in Friedrichshafen in southern Germany, there was an airship regatta (race). Along with the usual group of speedy nearly uncontrollable little blimps was this beauty which will be sure to be getting a lot of attention in the coming weeks. Team LaChLuVe has set the bar so high with their Fi-Fi- Fin-Fish that the airship races will never be the same, and may have a lot of new applicants. Unlike the propeller driven blimps and zeppelins, the air fish glides through the air propelled by a very natural looking swish of the tail, which also provides steering when holding it in place and gliding. The pectoral fins are servo actuated for additional control. I would be shocked not to see this as a consumer product within the next couple of years, and I can’t wait to see what shows up at the world air games next June.

Update: The Fi-Fi- Fin-Fish was made by Empa (a Swiss materials technology development institution) by using electro-active polymers to power the motion of the tail. When electricity is applied, the polymer contracts like a muscle to give the tail its kick. The fins, in combination with the low center of gravity, do a great job of keeping it upright. There is a further abstract for a more complex system with a flexing body here. A flexing strip along the top and bottom of the fish would be attached to the vertical ribs. The contraction of the polymer would cause the body to flex in a more natural fashion.

Update: The project was a collaboration with the Technical University of Berlin, and has been a several year project. Earlier versions of the fin-fish flew in the ’06 and ’07 regatta. Empa started with a more traditional airship, and got more fishy with each revision. Several tails were tested, as were several different ways of using the electroactive polymer.a

 

 

 

Part of their vision is creating a solar powered version that could operate efficiently and silently for surveillance. There is a growing demand for spy drones, and most of their competitiors sound like flying weed-whackers.

Similar Posts:

Lighter Than Air Penguins by Festo

Lighter Than Air Jellyfish by Festo