Jellyfish swim, birds fly as robots take off

Industrial application

As the bionic jellyfish floated quietly at the Beijing exhibition, robotic birds flew across the hall like flashes of lightning.

The smart birds' wings are about 2 meters long and the robots weigh just 450 grams. The "birds" take off and land without any trouble, flapping their wings.

Liu, the marketing director, said the intelligent birds' shape and their lightweight carbon fiber structure means that they can fly for about 15 minutes each time.

"The birds are not available for direct sale to the public, but the method we used to design their linear and rotary motion driving technology can also be used in a hydroelectric generator," Liu said.

The birds' bodies house batteries, motors and transmission components, as well as other electronic equipment.

Their position and other information can be recorded during flight and real time data is used to ensure stability and safety when they are in the air.

Liu said the company has received many requests from toy, entertainment and drone companies to buy these robots. "We'd rather use them for education and scientific research," she said.

Festo specializes in pneumatics and industrial automation, but these robotic creatures are an interesting way to test innovative designs that may end up in more-basic industrial devices.

"For example, to make a robotic octopus we did a lot of research on the tentacles... This is something we need in automation, where steel grabs have to 'catch' products directly on a production line, then stop, before moving again in the opposite direction. Now, we have some technical solutions that are inspired by this," Liu said.

She added that the process is similar to how the car industry uses concept vehicles as test beds for ideas that could find their way onto production lines.

Some companies are also producing animal-like robots for direct use in various fields. For example, package deliveries may be going to the dogs.

A robotic dog named ANYmal, researched and developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, can provide data such as positioning, routes and maps. It can also detect smells, sounds and heat.

An ANYmal weighs 30 kilograms and can carry up to 10 kg. It is not as agile as a real dog, but can move at a speed like human beings walk. The robot is equipped with laser radar and stereo-position cameras that can provide data that relates to navigation.

In Beijing, at the World Robot Conference exhibition center, a battery-powered ANYmal robot, with red body and a black metal basket on top of its head, ducked through a low door frame in its path, before turning carefully and climbing the front steps of a model front porch. On reaching the front door, it raised a paw to ring the doorbell and gently slid a package onto the doorstep.

These "dogbots" have been used widely in a variety of industries, such as tunneling and coal mining. Thanks to their flexible black-and-gray limbs, as well as carbon fiber and aluminum coating, they can rotate through 360 degrees and can move rapidly, both in daylight and at night.