May 2, 2008 -- In a development that seems straight from Hollywood, a new project aims to design teams of bio-inspired microrobots that could one day monitor terrorists or search for victims at disaster sites.
The five-year, $38 million Army Research Laboratory project combines industry, university, and defense expertise.
"Minority Report was probably one of the inspirations for this project," said William Devine of BAE Systems, the major partner in the project, known as the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance. "We've been showing the movie to our researchers to inspire them."
BAE and the other groups already have working microrobots and expect them to be ready for customized projects in 12 to 18 months.
The first microrobots will most likely only have one mode of transportation and one sensor, such as a spider-inspired walker equipped with a camera.
As the sensors and transportation methods use less power and require less space, the designers will pack more of both onto the robots.
To do all this, scientists will work to reduce the size and energy consumption of existing sensors and transmitters by a factor of 10 to 100, said Devine, while also looking at how animals perform the same tasks the microrobots will be designed for.
"We're looking at how bees do their tasks, how certain animals hunt, at animals with interesting physical abilities, like a gecko," said Devine.
Eventually, the scientists hope to develop one microrobot that can walk like a spider, climb like a gecko, fly like an insect, hover like a hummingbird and cooperate like bees, all while gathering still images, video, radar and other information that can be sent back to commanders in the field.
The microrobots will range in size from a few inches in length to the size of a hand.
They will have a range of a few city blocks, said Devine, and will be carried either by a larger robot or a human close to their target before being deployed.
Other major partners in the project are the University of California-Berkeley, California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of New Mexico, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
"This is really cutting-edge research," said Kellar Autumn, a professor of biology at Lewis and Clark University not involved in the new project but who has created a robot that can climb walls using the same methods a gecko does.
"This is realistic," said Autumn. "They won't get something that climbs exactly like a gecko in a year, but they will get something that climbs close to a gecko."
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