![]() ![]() Not only are these connected to one another, but they are also connected to the oscillators of their neighboring links. The movement is performed by motors, which in turn are controlled by nonlinear oscillators (two for each link in the chain). The salamander work was done using a chain of modular robots, each of which can move relative to its nearest neighbors via actuated links. But the repercussions of this work, and the work it builds on, have at least as many potential applications in engineering as in science–including the notion of adaptive furniture, or “Roombots.” They tested their proposed neural model on a waterproof modular robot and found that they were able to replicate salamander behavior so well that they could draw biological conclusions from the experiment. ![]() Earlier this year, he and his colleagues published a paper in Science that showed how the salamander–an amphibian–is able to swim, walk and crawl as appropriate without making any explicit decision to do so. The EPFL project, which is also receiving support from U.K.-based Micro- soft Research Cambridge, is being led in part by Auke Ijspeert, an expert in coordinated movement. Actuators in the robots themselves or in the links that form between them would allow many kinds of basic movement, including locomotion. But the far more practical idea of adaptive furniture, currently being developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL Lausanne), works on the macroscopic scale and should be doable with today's technology: Modular robots would link themselves together or break themselves apart to form new structures that could be active or passive as required. Science fiction is full of micro- and nanoscale smart materials that can reconfigure themselves to create a kind of living landscape– a vision that is far from be- ing realized. The conference room is ready to be vacuumed. Then, when the lecture is over at the end of the afternoon, the furniture clears itself away while the presenter is still talking to the line of people who waited behind. Even more chairs start to emerge from stacks of little square boxes along the sidewall, each one wiggling along to take its place until the room setup is complete. The table, no longer needed, dismantles itself and re-forms into a few more chairs, and these go to join the others. In the next 10 minutes, people will be arriving to hear a lecture, so the chairs walk across the room and stand in neat rows, starting at the back. ![]()
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