Researchers Make FlipperBot, a Baby Sea Turtle Robot
Posted on April 24, 2013
Georgia Tech and Northwestern University researchers have developed FlipperBot, a robot inspired by baby sea turtles. The researchers studied the movements of 25 hatchling sea turtles. They say having flexible wrists may help the turtles move without disturbing too much sand. FlipperBot moves in a similar manner through a test bed. The study was published here in the journal, Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
Daniel Goldman, an associate professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in a statement, "On soft sand, the animals move their limbs in such a way that they don't create a yielding of the material on which they're walking. That means the material doesn't flow around the limbs and they don't slip. The surprising thing to us was that the turtles had comparable performance when they were running on hard ground or soft sand."
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