Investor's Business Daily January 05, 2009
More Types Of Digger Robots Unearthed
By Doug Tsuruoka
Robots do quite a few things these days. Some fly. Others clean house. A few put parts together on factory floors.
And some robots dig, a lesser-known but promising area of robotics.
Such diggers are crammed with microcomputers and other technology. They can be 18 feet tall or four inches long. Already, some are being tapped for military, energy and space exploration tasks.
Companies poised to profit from the rise of digger robots include Bedford, Mass.-based iRobot Corp. (IRBT) and privately held Bluefin Robotics Corp. in Cambridge, Mass. Bluefin is owned by Battelle, a nonprofit research group based in Columbus, Ohio. Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Tokyu Construction Co. are also developing digger robots.
The Pentagon is using hundreds of go-kart-sized robots — from iRobot and Foster-Miller, a unit of London-based QinetiQ Group — to dig up roadside bombs in Iraq. Smaller versions of the devices, which have mechanical arms, are being used to search caves in Afghanistan.
John Pike, who heads research firm GlobalSecurity.org, says the Pentagon wouldn't have deployed these robots unless they worked well.
Pike says mine detection and disposal is another natural task for digger robots. "You're going to see a lot of deployment of robots on the battlefield in the next five to 10 years," Pike said. "Any place you put people at risk is a place for a robot."
One of the largest digger robots is the UT-1 Ultra Trencher, made by Soil Machine Dynamics for fellow U.K. company CTC Marine Projects. It's used to bury undersea pipelines and phone cables.
The machine weighs 60 tons and is 18 feet tall. It can operate a mile underwater, carving out trenches on the sea floor after being uncradled from a mother ship.
Compact robots are being employed by NASA as part of its Mars rover program to dig and analyze Martian soil samples.
The latest digger is RoboClam, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The gadget is a mechanical copy of the razor clam, a shellfish native to U.S. waters that is so strong it can dig through sand at a speed of about a centimeter a second.
The device is about four inches long and is connected via a tube to a scuba tank of compressed air. The "clam" part of the device is equipped with tiny pneumatic pistons.
Anette "Peko" Hosoi, an associate professor at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and MIT grad student Amos Winter built the prototype device by studying a real razor clam in the lab.
"The ultimate idea is to come up with a self-contained robot that doesn't need to be connected to a larger device to work," Winter said.
Work on the project was sponsored by Bluefin, Battelle and Chevron Corp. (CVX)
The backers hope RoboClam will lead to a "smart" anchor that burrows into the sea floor to position itself.
It could extract itself by moving in the opposite direction. This type of device might be useful in offshore oil drilling and exploration.
It could also be used to dig into the seabed to detonate buried underwater mines.
Results of the MIT team's research on RoboClam were presented on Nov. 23 at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
The MIT researchers also discovered an entirely new way of digging through sand by watching a real razor clam in the lab and designing RoboClam to work in the same manner.
They found that the fast up-and-down, opening-and-closing movements turn the waterlogged "sand" around the clam into a liquidlike quicksand.
Winter says this lets real razor clams expend relatively small amounts of energy when they dig. He says a typical razor clam uses the equivalent of a single AA-size battery to travel three-tenths of a mile.
This is the distance you would have if you totaled all of the clam's up-and-down motions.
Winter says this could lead to robots that dig more efficiently on the ocean bottom.
RoboClam is a "learning tool," he said. "We're using it to come up with rules to design a wide variety of digging robots."
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