UC BERKELEY NEWS RELEASE, 6/14/99
Using biology to make Star Wars come true: a joint project between Concord school and UC Berkeley
By Robert Sanders, Public Affairs UC Berkeley
BERKELEY--Students at Oak Grove Middle School in Concord were not standing in line last month to see the animated robots in Star Wars.
They were in the classroom designing them.
In the first such course in "biodesign," developed by University of California, Berkeley, professor Robert Full, students study how animals move - how they swim, crawl, run, jump, fly and jet and use that information to design robots to search for life in the solar system.
The middle-school students will present their final robot designs - what Full calls Biomorphic Explorers - on Tuesday, June 15, at 7:30 p.m. at the Oak Grove Middle School, 2050 Minert Road, in Concord. Media are invited to attend.
"My parents are thrilled and my kids are so up about this course," said Dr. Audrey Wagman, principal of Oak Grove Middle School. "It's giving the students a real interest in science."
According to Full, students learn to look at animals in a different way - from an engineering perspective. They come to understand principles such as efficiency, stability, maneuverability, robustness and redundancy.
With inspiration from biology, students design and build physical models that capture many of the unique features of nature's technology. They are building their models with Zoobs, a modeling system marketed as a toy by Primordial. The company's president, Michael Grey, is a UC Berkeley alumnus.
Full initiated the biodesign course this spring with his undergraduate students at UC Berkeley using funds from an endowed chair in education created with the support of the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund.
This past semester, students were organized into design teams based on mode of locomotion and asked to search for original research on animal locomotion. They produced an oral report as if the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were there asking about design ideas from nature.
"The depth of understanding using the active design approach was greater than I have seen in 10 years," Full said. "We had students questioning the relevance of Nobel Prize winning discoveries."
Since Full's daughter, Mary, is in the sixth grade class at Oak Grove and could assist him, he decided to attempt a similar biodesign course with her class. Working with Patricia Bannister, a science instructor at the school, he created a course in which the students use as a textbook original research papers from biology and an interactive CD.
These students too presented detailed reports in a "symposium," as if they were reporting to NASA on requirements to build an explorer robot.
Students focused on the design advantages they learned from animals, not on the details of electronics or motors. Geckos, for example, rely on dry adhesion without glue or suction to climb up even the smoothest rocks, while a shrimp-like animal called a stomatopod rolls on the beaches of Panama. Insect larvae jet about by sending a stream of water out their anus, lizards use ribs with membranes to glide, grasshoppers use springs in their legs to jump and cheetahs use their backbones as springs to run fast.
The middle school students also traveled to UC Berkeley to see cutting-edge research in locomotion. Students heard about how dinosaurs ran and flew and how geckos run up walls. They saw Robo-fly, a device that simulates how the wings of flies work, and they even simulated a walk on Mars by using a harness associated with a treadmill.
They participated in a treasure hunt for original research articles in the BioSciences Library so they could see where and how original discoveries are reported. To assist in designing these robots, the middle school students "went" to Mars, Full said. They executed and coordinated a whole mission, starting with landing on an artificial Mars surface, then analyzing video data of the surface, making maps, driving a rover and looking for signs of life, which they found in their final "live" mission in front of parents and teachers.
Using nature's technology is becoming more possible than ever before, Full said, because of spectacular advances in materials, actuators, mechanisms and adaptive control or electronic learning. Yet, few engineers have been taught broadly enough to use these new, very biological design capabilities. Biologists are in a unique position to offer new design ideas for future robots.
Full does just that in his PolyPEDAL (Performance, Energetics and Dynamics of Animal Locomotion) research laboratory at UC Berkeley, where he discovers principles of legged locomotion by studying six-legged cockroaches, eight-legged crabs, 44-legged centipedes and geckos that peel their toes like tape. He shared his biological inspiration with Disney/Pixar on its recent, highly successful movie, "A Bug's Life."
He also has provided nature's design ideas to the company IS Robotics, resulting in the first underwater legged robot, named Ariel, that can maneuver in the surf, and the soon-to-come mechanical gecko.
"We have even reached the time when it is possible to begin to think about replacing motors with artificial muscles," he said.
Full consults with Intelligent Inference Systems Corp. in the design of a two-legged Mars walker using artificial muscles, with support from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. He is collaborating with the Stanford Research Institute to see how rubberband-like artificial muscles match up with real muscles and with engineers at Stanford University who can, for the first time, manufacture flexible segments that have embedded within them sensors and actuators like artificial muscles.
"These new capabilities will open up a whole new world
of robotic designs," Full said. "And these students
will be ready to deliver the next generation of biologically
inspired ideas."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This server has been established by the University of California
at Berkeley
Public Information Office. Copyright for all items on this server
held by
The Regents of the University of California. Thanks for your
interest in UC
Berkeley.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Send comments to: comments@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
For more information on the project check out their web pages
at
http://polypedal.berkeley.edu/Oak_Grove/OG_home.html and http://polypedal.berkeley.edu/IB148-Spring99/IB148_home.html
or Robert Full's laboratory web page at http://polypedal.berkeley.edu.
Robot designs influenced by Full's studies can be found at IS
Robotics website, http://www.isr.com/research/ariel.html and
NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (http://www.niac.usra.edu/studies/9801/jacobs.html).
Robert Full can be reached at (510) 642-9896 or rjfull@socrates.berkeley.edu.
Contra Costa Times, June, 24, 1999
Today Oak Grove, tomorrow outer space.
From Oak Grove to the stars.
A group of Oak Grove Middle School students, under the leadership of UC Berkeley Professor Robert Full, culminated their year-long research project with a presentation Tuesday, June 15.
The project, "Biomorphic Explorers," challenged his students to design robots with the best animal characteristics to seek life in the solar system as if NASA had assigned the research, Full said.
The result were six prototype robots - one for each method of animal locomotion: jumping, jetting, running, swimming, flying and crawling.
"My mom was really proud," said student Miriam de Los Santos, 12. "She liked that Professor Full has worked with NASA and that he's worked with Disney."
The fact that Full worked with the Walt Disney Co. with its movie, "A Bug's Life," was important to Miriam's mom because he was working with a sixth-grade Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) science class at Oak Grove Middle School.
"Mr. Full came to us and said he had received a grant for an outreach program and would like to work with the class through Berkeley," said science teacher Patricia Bannister.
The idea to work with the GATE class came after Full put together the original Biomorphic Explorers project for his undergraduate students in Berkeley. The results were better than he expected, he said.
His university students mastered the assignment, and his 11-year-old daughter, Mary, offered her opinions when he talked about the students' proposals.
"She was very honest about what she thought would work and what she thought wouldn't," Full said. Full knew the GATE class that his daughter was enrolled in worked on a different project each year and decided to adapt the Biomorphic Explorers project for them.
"I had the idea that if you took these biological principles and you gave them to kids, they would come up with incredibly original designs, " Full said, "because they haven't been told that different designs will not work."
He made the project proposal to Oak Grove Principal Audrey Wagman and to Bannister, and his proposal was accepted.
The project was divided into three phases.
First, students used the CD ROM, "How Animals Move," as a textbook to study different forms of animal locomotion. They also interacted with animals, such as giant cockroaches from PolyPEDAL, a research lab headed by Full, studying the performance, energetics and dynamics of animal locomotion.
Then they went to Berkeley on a "scavenger hunt" to search for original research information and a simulated walk on Mars. They were divided into groups, and team members learned to work together in aspects of the mission, such as landing the craft and communicating geographical information to navigate it.
The final phase of the project involved using the knowledge they gained about the surface of Mars and animal movements to design their explorer robots.
One of the designers, 12-year-old Kurt Winbigler, said that they knew that the surface of planets is not smooth and that they needed to take that fact into account when designing the explorers.
"Cars are not as agile," Winbigler said. "These robots should be able to explore planets better."
Each team created a diagram and then constructed their design using Zoobs, ball-and-socket-type of modeling units, donated by Primordial.
"I went down to the toy store with my 2-year-old (daughter) and I looked at different toys up in the shelves, " Full said. "I sent letters, and they sent some samples back."
He said he decided to use Zoobs because of their flexible and dynamic design.
The kids took full advantage of the diverse range-of-motion capabilities of the units, creating spring-like skeletal structures, limbs, wings, and fins.
One robot, the "Spidurtle V9," for example, combines a turtle's cross-linked shell for protection and a spider's web-shooting mechanism for anchoring that could pull the body up or bring the samples down. This robots walks on four legs and can use them as dog paws in the water.
For swifter travel, the "Poseidon 2000" model can walk, swim or glide. The outer body has optimum stability and a hard shell for protection. It walks on six feet like a cockroach and has two contracting extremities that are webbed like duck feet and have a figure-eight pattern of motion to glide.
The nautical craft inside the robot has the flexible body of an eel with a dolphin's tail for speedy underwater travel. It can also roll up like a stomatopod, a shrimp-like animal native to Panama, to travel on land before tucking itself safely back into its outer body.
The students knew that there wasn't going to be a NASA representative on hand for the symposium, but they worked just as hard, Full said. And although NASA representatives were not present, Sarita Thakoor, head of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab for which Full has consulted, promised to visit the program's web site at http://polypedal.berkeley.edu/Oak_Grove/OG_home.html to look at the designs, Full said.
Perhaps the next time an astronaut takes a "giant leap for mankind," he will be descending from a cow-shaped craft that can hop like a bunny and fly as high as a falcon.
Send comments to Robert
Full
Last updated 6/23/99