Robot designed to mimic the abilities of dung beetle displays impressive object manipulation skills

A multi-institutional trio of roboticists has designed and built a robot that mimics the abilities of the dung beetle. In their paper published in the journal Advanced Science, Binggwong Leung, Stanislav Gorb and Poramate Manoonpong outline their reasons for building it and describe how well it worked when tested.

Dung beetles are unique in two ways: They walk differently than other six-legged creatures and they are able to manipulate objects much larger than they are. In studying dung beetle mechanics and learning from prior efforts involved in creating robots that mimic stick insects, the researchers concluded that a dung beetle robot could offer features not available in other designs—primarily in the ability to manipulate and move large objects using a small footprint.

The researchers studied dung beetle locomotion and object transport and noted that the beetles were able to move large dung samples by morphing their top four legs around large parts of an object and then using their lower legs to push.

To build their robot, the team started with stick insect designs. They then modified them in ways that mimicked the dung beetle. Then, instead of using machine learning to teach the robot what to do, as is done with many other modern robots, the researchers used a modular, neural-based, loco-manipulation control approach based on just two behaviors—pitch and roll for the upper two pairs of legs and simple biomechanics for the lower pair. The result was a robot they call ALPHA.

They tested their robot with a large hollow ball and found it more than capable of pushing it to a desired location. They also found that the robot was capable of more than just moving a ball around. It could be used to transport material inside of the ball, for example.

They suggest the robot could be used in search-and-rescue operations since it is able to move over uneven and unknown terrain easily. They state that there is room for improvement, but their work could inspire other roboticists to look at other natural forms of locomotion when building robots of the future.