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Science

8 Legged Robotic Micro Ant from Sweden 57

Posted by Hemos from the to-the-tune-of-the-little-old-lady-from-pasadena dept.
Steinar Bang writes " Swedish researchers at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, are creating micro-robots and micro-motion systems as micromachined 3D silicon structures. They have created an 8-legged robotic micro ant able to carry 50 times its own weight on its back. " Cool looking 'bots - if you like this type of thing check out the bionic rats.
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8 Legged Robotic Micro Ant from Sweden More

8 Legged Robotic Micro Ant from Sweden

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  • The Hacker and the Ants is excellent! Those particular ants were software, rather than hardware, but who cares - it's a most entertaining read. I personally have found Rucker's novels to be a mixed bag, some good, some, well, not good. But The Hacker and the Ants is the best that I've read thus far.

    For entertaining nonfiction, it's hard to beat Rucker's SEEK!. Both of these, and more, can probably be found at your local (or online) book merchant.

    You can also go get some neat software for free (cellular automata, artificial life, and chaos stuff mostly) at Rucker's web page [sjsu.edu].
  • Yes, ants have 6 legs and spiders have 8. But methinks that's not the point. Ants are social creatures, and their strength and versatility is in their group behavior. Spiders tend to be solitary predators, so despite the number of legs it might be more accurate to compare these mechanical micro-critters to ants. Particularly if they're intended to work together with some kind of "hive-mind" coordinating their actions.

    If they had a hive-mind and could fly, they'd be robotic bees or wasps.

    If they had a hive-mind and were designed for demolition or some other destuctive purpose, they'd be robotic termites.

    As it is, the description of them as robotic ants seems reasonable.

  • Re:How much do real ants carry... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A=Other ants can carry 10-20 times their own body weigth.

    B=Leaf cutting ants can only carry 12-14 times their own weight.

    C= There is no known species of ant which can carry more than 50 times its body weight. I would mark you redundant...but redundancy is within your own statements. By statements A and B, we already know that C is true....so you didn't need to include it.

    Sorry...i just felt like picking at your little niggles.

  • This remind me of an article [newscientist.com] in New Scientist [newscientist.com].

    Where a scientist have made a small "railroad" out of molecules.

    I think it is great. We have to use something like this when we build our nanotech assemblers

  • i love that title.. i think its hilarious.
  • What is rarely mentioned is that most of the lives lost in the Hiroshima bombing were civilian lives, while an invasion would most likely have led to a larger military loss.

    Also, I'm shocked that some people tend not to count non-U.S. populations as people, so they only see the statistics for the U.S. as opposed to world statistics.

    Your original point still remains true, though. The advantages of nuclear power may well outweigh its disadvantages, though when disaster occurs with nuclear power (due to human error or otherwise), it's far more destructive in its effect as opposed to more conventional power sources.

    And I'm not going to argue the points of nulear weapons; it's now almost a given that they have more drawbacks than advantages.

    (p.s. isn't this thread offtopic? What does this have to do with the robots?)
  • Well, call me strange, but I always thought it was the applications that display the video files, not the OS. Berk.
  • This takes ant farms to a whole new level. I mean you can spill them and they won't bite you. I had an ant farm when I was a kid. It was with those big ants not much smaller than that Robot ant in this article and man when those things bite it leaves a welt the size of a quarter. Now what I want to see is that you can have an ant farm full of these little robots and be able to control them from your computer to things like little bunkers for my minuture remote control army troops.
  • The Hacker and the Ants by Rudy Rucker. Ants kind of like these feature very prominently in the book, and it's a very good read. It's kind of 'Stephenson Lite'.
  • If you are interested in playing a video game that allows you to program the Artificial Intelligence of a mechanical spider (CyBug) then by all means visit my site [tacticalneuronics.com] and download the shareware copy. It allows you to create the AI and pit these creations against each other in a battle simulator. It looks like the concept is going from fantasy into reality, God help us all... :)
  • Ok, we use kilograms in Europe and you use pounds in the States. However, look at the article:

    A robot carrying 25 times its own weight in Europe would not be able to carry 50 times its weight in the US!

    Thats _g-force_ for you, and it's supposed to be the same all over the planet. (apart from those places where it really sucks)

  • They fail to mention that it's also blonde and has enormous breats.
  • If you're into the small robot concept, check out Stiquito [computer.org], a nifty 6-legged robot. The books you can buy with Stiquito are also excellent introductions into the basics of robotics. They help introduce some of the basics without overwhelming you with nasty things like calculating Jacobians of matrices. It's $15 on its own, and between $30-$50 with one of the books

  • A=Other ants can carry 10-20 times their own body weigth.
    B=Leaf cutting ants can only carry 12-14 times their own weight.

    C= There is no known species of ant which can carry more than 50 times its body weight. I would mark you redundant...but redundancy is within your own statements. By statements A and B, we already know that C is true....so you didn't need to include it.

    Sorry...i just felt like picking at your little niggles.



    Heh, I pasted those 2 directly from a web page, I didn't even notice that they said exactly the same thing, thanks for the boot to the head.>:)

    Kintanon

  • Doesn't need to be this big. (Score:3)

    by Nygard ( 3896 ) on Monday October 11, 1999 @04:38AM (#1624083) Homepage
    From the description of their process, the only reason this thing is so big is so that the researchers could find it. Using silicon substrate and a photolithographic technique, they should be able to make conveyors and walkers less than 1 cm on a side.

    Of course, then somebody has to come up with a practical application for the really small buggers. Like a 1 cm CCD on its back...

  • "We are the ANTZ. We will assimilate you. Resistance is futile." >:)

    Yeah, even mechanical ants will get ya! BTW, ants only have 6 legs!

  • I say look at the atom bomb, Einstein really thought it would only be used for good. If we look into it, hasn't Nuclear Power brought us more bad things than good. Okay, what bad thing has Nuclear Power done?

    Please excuse me whilst I get on my soapbox

    Nuclear power is the cleanest[1] safest[2] form of power we have on land, and on the sea it's so much nicer than having to store tons of fuel, and for a submarine it means you don't have to surface.

    But mainly you were referring to the atom bomb. The A-Bomb saved lives, both Japanese and Allied. Think about the price both of Allied lives and of Japanese if we would have had to do an invasion.

    I understand that the Revisionists have probably gotten to you, though... America always is the evil force in the universe. The A-Bomb was wrong, because it was powerful.

    Why do the revisionists screw with history so? Why is the US the bad guy and Japan the good guy? Do we remember which country shot first? That little thing called Perl Harbor? You know, when the countries wern't at war?

    I'm not saying that the US government is always right, or that we have always done the moral thing, but please, don't believe everything you're tought in schools.

    [1] Nuclear waste is pretty small volume-wise and, unlike chemical (oil, coal) power facilities it turns into non-toxic stuff with time. And it doesn't destroy nearly so much land as hydroelectric... although after everything gets flooded Hydro power is pretty good...

    [2] When was the last time you saw a nuclear disaster that hurt or killed people in the US? Then compare to the number of explosions and fires and such with other types of power.

  • No, check my home page =P. Yeah ants can carry up to 50 times their own weight.

  • Hehe, yea, but I have never seen an ant with external power cables. :-)


    -
  • That depends on what species you are talking about. Hmm, time to pull out a snipbit out of The Ants FAQ:

    4.6 [8/15/1999] How much weight can a worker ant carry?

    Up to 50 times their own weight! --Angelo Scott


    See? Up to 50 times! :) Please go to my home page if you want more information on ants.

  • Ants do have six legs. Maybe it was supposed to be spiders? Ah, someone doesn't know their biology :).

  • Oh yeah! No need to feed them with food and spoil their Ant Farms/nests! Heh, you could probably left them roaming your house to keep burglars out!

    Yeah, protect my computer systems! >:) Ahhhhhh, the possibilities with bionic ants!

  • Dude, every ant movies are B-movie title haha!

  • I wonder what happened if you mix them up since they are different species ;).

  • ... in terms of their body weight?

    Is it less than 50 times?

  • Videos (Score:1)

    by Psiren ( 6145 )
    xanim is unable to display the quicktime videos =(
  • I really don't know if I like the idea of tiny robots being able to follow me around and inspect what I do.

    suuuuure you say... it's just an experiment you say... it will only be used for good purposes you say... I say look at the atom bomb, Einstein really thought it would only be used for good. If we look into it, hasn't Nuclear Power brought us more bad things than good.

    It's not that I doubt the integrity of these scientists, it's just that I can't trust "Big Brother" to use this technology wisely... not that I can trust him for anything else....

  • Re:How much do real ants carry... (Score:3)

    by Kintanon ( 65528 ) on Monday October 11, 1999 @02:45AM (#1624097) Homepage Journal
    Leaf cutting ants can only carry 12-14 times their own weight.

    Other ants can carry 10-20 times their own body weigth.

    There is no known species of ant which can carry more than 50 times its body weight.

    This page has more info on ants and the various things they can accomplish.
    http://home.att.net/~B-P.TRUSCIO/STRANGER.htm

    Kintanon


  • Nuclear power has always had the POTENTIAL of being an extremely valuable resource. I blame the individuals who mishandle and misuse this amazing, yet potentialy dangerous, power source.

    Remember: guns dont kill people, people kill people. (Substitute NUKES for GUNS).
  • Looks like they don't have power supply or control electonics onboard. :(

    And they have eight legs => not insects. :p
  • The "bionic rats" article you point to has
    expired on Yahoo and is no longer available.
    Where can I read about this story?

    Please check the links before reposting elder
    stories.

  • Hahaha...poor (biological) ants (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Imagine being a worker ant, wandering around looking for some food one day...and you run into a mechanical replica of yourself.

    I wonder if they bite. Can they make ants hills? Insecticides are probably useless against them too. "Dear...looks like we got another outbreak of mechanical ants. Hand me the giant magnet."


    On the serious side, as another poster mentioned...I'm a bit concerned abou tthese being used for bad purposes. Mainly tools for spying. Whether it's a company stealing secrets from another compant, sabotoging (spelling?) computers among other things, etc. or being used for widespread monitoring of dissidence. Perhaps capable of carrying deadly poisins to inject into unsuspecting people. Creepy.
  • of course I thought I remembered learning in elementary school that insects have 6 legs and spiders have 8? Or has that changed in the 15 years since I was a second grader?
  • Anyone know where I can get the Yahoo news story about the rats? They only keep stories for 2 weeks. I've seen this happen with a few links from older /. articles.
  • I'm not sure of the number but I think that ants carry a good bit more than 50 times their weight...I sorta recall watching a Discovery show and them saying it was in the hundreds... but don't quote me now 'cause I ain't said...


    -Red
  • Oh good. In that case they're spiders :)

    If they get too close to my computer while I'm on line, will I have a spider web? :P
  • Of course the power supply is the big problem here. I don't know how much current these babies draw, but somehow I think the required battery would exceed the maximum load in itself. Why can't batteries develop like computers damnit... :-/

    Otherwise, integrating the control system onto the die could hardly be that hard. (Maybe expensive... but not like this research is cheap anyway...)

    -
  • 'bots walking around my house will be squised like any other insect walking around my house, completely mercilessly. Or maybe I'll make my own bot-spiders which catch the ants and destroy them. :)
  • I don't know how much current these babies draw...

    Ok, so call me a blind monkey. It says it draws 200mW per leg at maximum warp. 1.6W total. With a 1.5V battery, you got about 1A. Few batteries of the appropriate size can even deliver that much current at all, let alone sustain it more than a very short time. We're talking 5 min here... and no payload. :-( Still way kewl tech though.


    -

  • It carried 2.5g... but where did you find its own weight?

    -
  • Do you think they'll set off metal detectors in government buildings? :)
  • Actually, The ants could have their own charging garages, which would afford (this isn't my number) 5 minutes of roaming/farming/enacting civil war.

    I'm hoping the bionic rat costs less than 6 million USD...

  • Am I the only person who thinks the name of this post sounds like a B-movie title?
  • I obviously didn't get my point across. I know both this technology and nuclear power have the POTENTIAL to be "good technlogy" but what I'm doubting is that it will be used in a good and noble manner.

    Remember also that governments change, Lies don't

  • a comment and a question.
    the question first:

    Did anyone catch the angular velocity of the actuators? It would be in angle/time/grooves, as each joint consists of several grooves. Also the torque would be interesting.

    Now the comment:

    200 mW is quite a bit for a micro actuator, no? I forget if that was per leg or for the whole ant. but whoa! I seem to recall that modern laptop batteries have power ratings of 10 odd watthours, but they weigh significantly more than 2.5 grams.

    How far can it walk with a battery that light? probably only a few minutes.

    Johan

  • That little thing called Perl Harbor?

    Argh! I hate it when them CGI scripts just bomb out on me.

    Agreed about the good points of Nuclear power, so some people got irradiated in Japan a couple of weeks ago. Better than the dozens upon dozens who die because of a coal-face collapse or from an oil explosion (e.g. Piper Alpha). It also puts the power generation into a remote location, so disasters involving a fast moving vehicle loaded with tonnes of fuel don't happen.

    Still, we aren't going to have mini-nuclear reactors on the back of robotic ants in the near future (I hope). Of course, we could get further into space if nuclear powered space-craft were allowed...

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