Sure you could have a robot assist you around the home, or even one that'll make factories friendlier, but we'll opt for a robot sea turtle any day of the week. The Swiss folks over at ETH Zurich are working on making that a reality with the Naro-Tartaruga, a turtle-inspired machine that would swim efficiently while carrying cargo in its shell. It's currently a cylindrical aluminum vessel with a couple of flippers, but concept designs include that totally bad-ass bot in the image above. The turtle-bot has a top speed of over 7 knots, so it'll handily beat any real sea turtle in a race, and the big torso has enough space for battery and sensors that are necessary for autonomous function. The fins on the turtle have a fully three-dimensional mechanism -- there are three actuators per fin, and each actuate the fin axle independently. The end goal is for the development of underwater autonomous vehicles, which will hopefully bring us one step closer to SeaQuest DSV. In the meantime, we'd like one just so we can freak the hell out of our cats.
Filed under: Robots, Alt
Heroes in a half shell: autonomous robot sea turtles in development originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
IEEE Spectrum, PopSci |
ETH Zurich |
Email this |
Comments
Who says that drones need to be hugely complicated, multi-rotor jobs? Regardless, they never told that to the folks behind the Monospinner, a one-rotor drone that's been entered into the ETH Zurich Flying Machine Arena. Unlike, say, a quadrocopter, t...
Don't worry about needing artistic sensibilities to produce street art -- if researchers have their way, all you'd need is a good photo and the right tools. They've developed a robotic spray can that produce large murals based on pre-supplied images...
We've seen some ridiculously tiny electronics in our day, but this might take the cake. Swiss researchers have built an optical networking switch so small that it's measured on the atomic scale -- in fact, it's smaller than the wavelength of light i...
As clever as robotic cars may be, they have one obvious disadvantage over flying drones: their journey stops the moment they run into a wall. Disney Research and ETH Zurich have a clever workaround, however. Their prototype VertiGo robot uses two til...
No, that's not an up-close look at a monitor. That's the world's tiniest color inkjet image made large, and you may not need it blown up to see it in the future -- if you're willing to lay down some cash. In a hybrid of scientific discovery and pub...
Researchers at ETH Zurich have accomplished a bit of modern-day alchemy, transforming 20 carat gold into a lightweight foam. Well, technically it's an aerogel: an exceedingly light and porous matrix of material. It's so porous, in fact, that the foam...
Even with a sure-stepping robot like DARPA's Big Dog, there is still plenty of terrain that today's packbots simply can't handle. That's why a team of researchers from ETH Zurich's Autonomous Systems Lab has devised a way to ensure these robots nev...
Today on In Case You Missed It: Scientists programmed quadcopters to autonomously construct a basic rope bridge that could support the weight of a person, all part of an effort to use drones when distances or climbing might be necessary. A new Kick...
One of the big selling points of drones is that they can get to areas that aren't exactly safe or accessible by humans. That's why watching quadrocopters assembling a rope bridge that's sturdy enough for a person to walk across is so damned awesome...