Does Black Mirror predict literally everything?
Scientists had designed tiny robot bugs that can fit in hard to reach places, journey inhospitable environments, and hopefully not be hacked like in Netflix’s Black Mirror.
Researchers at Swanson School of Engineering in Pennsylvania have created the bugs capable of doing jobs humans can not.
“These robots could be used to access confined areas for imaging or environmental evaluation, take water samples, or perform structural evaluations,” said Junfeng Gao, who led the research. “Anywhere you want to access confined places—where a bug could go but a person could not—these machines could be useful.”
Researchers studied how bugs move to create their own, using jump movements instead of crawling like grasshoppers and locusts, reports Science Daily.
Ravi Shankar, professor of industrial engineering, explained: “It’s akin to loading an arrow into a bow and shooting it—the robots latch on to build up energy and then release it in an impulsive burst to spring forward.
“Usually, actuation in the artificial muscles we work with is fairly slow. We were drawn to the question, ‘How do we take this artificial muscle and use it to generate a jumping actuation rather than slow actuation?’”
Using polymer muscle, the structure of the curve allows the mechanism to build energy when charged with a “few volts of electricity.”
The cricket-sized robots employ such methods to hop across the sand and granular surfaces as the pavement and even jump across water.
But you can’t help but think back to Black Mirror’s season 3 episode, Hated in the Nation. Robotic bees were created to combat the loss in the regular-bee population, but naturally, they were hacked and used to assassinate people.
Fingers crossed for the little critters, can they collect all the change from behind the sofa?
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