Tiny, bug-like CU Boulder robot has potential to aid first responders

Sep. 11—A little bug-inspired robot created by a team of engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder has the potential to someday aid first responders during disasters.

The robot's name is CLARI, which stands for Compliant Legged Articulated Robotic Insect. It was built in the image of a bug. It's tiny, squishable and can shape-shift to fit through different gaps. The robot can fit in the palm of a hand and weighs less than a ping-pong ball.

"It has a modular design, which means it's very easy to customize and add more legs," doctoral student Heiko Kabutz said in a news release. "Eventually, we'd like to build an eight-legged, spider-style robot that could walk over a web."

Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram said CLARI is still in its early stages, depending on wires for its power supply and to receive basic commands. The goal is to enable CLARI to crawl independently and fit into spaces where no robot has been before — like the insides of jet engines or the rubble of collapsed buildings. From those locations, it could send information back to emergency personnel to aid in response.

"Most robots today basically look like a cube," Jayaram said. "Why should they all be the same? Animals come in all shapes and sizes."

In its basic form, the robot is shaped like a square with one leg along each of its four sides. CLARI can then shift on command to get wider, like a crab, or more elongated, like a cockroach. The robot can start at 1.3 inches wide in its square shape to about 0.8 inches wide in its elongated form, according to the release.

The team views this initial CLARI design as the first of a series to build smaller, more nimble robots. One goal is to add sensors to the robot so it can detect and react to obstacles or objects in its path. Kabutz said in the release that the engineers are also experimenting on how to give the robot the right mix of flexibility and strength, which gets more difficult with the addition of more legs.

The end goal is to create a robot that thinks and acts like a real bug, where it can navigate its surroundings and avoid trees or rocks in its way to get to where it needs to go.

"When we try to catch an insect, they can disappear into a gap," Kabutz said in the release. "But if we have robots with the capabilities of a spider or a fly, we can add cameras or sensors, and now we're able to start exploring spaces we couldn't get into before."