14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers wishing to explain in further detail how it is that animals such as seals and turtles manage to use their flippers and fins in order to navigate complex surfaces like sand have designed and built the robot featured in the video above.
The sea-turtle inspired robot created by these researchers crawls with the help of two front limbs alone, sources say. As noticeable in the video above, the limbs are fairly similar to flippers.
“One of the main findings of our paper was that when the robot was fitted with a free wrist, it was able to move more effectively over the ground as it allowed the flipper to remain locked in place within a solid region of sand and thus disturbed less material during the forward thrust,” researcher Daniel Goldman said.
“With a fixed wrist, the robot also interacts with the ground that has already been disturbed by its previous steps, which hinders its movement,” he later added.
The data collected with the aid of this robot is expected to help scientists built better multi-terrain robots.
The scientists who worked on this project hope that their sea turtle-inspired robot will also yield benefits as far as ongoing conservation efforts are concerned.
A detailed description of the robot was published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics this April 24.