A Nose for Toxins: Feral Robotic Dogs - Moving in the Wild
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Give these dogs their due, though: there’s a lot more to becoming “feral” than being abandoned. Those mechanical dog legs that work so well indoors won’t take them very far on uneven surfaces. “When they come out of the box, they trip over carpet,” Professor Jeremijenko pointed out in an interview with the Ithaca Journal. Think what would happen if you tried to run them as is on the old sidewalks, grassy unkempt grounds, and gravel that make up the sites that need investigating.
So the first change that Professor Jeremijenko’s students need to make to their new pets is in their locomotion system. Instead of standing and walking on legs, most of the dogs end up rolling on wheels. And the designs are as individual as the students. Some use conventional rubber wheels from large toy cars. Others use treads from toy tanks. Still others used more original designs.
For instance, sometimes the wheels need to be adapted. One student found that he needed to add something to his pet’s smooth foam tires to give them more traction, so he studded the rear tires with ordinary screws, a cheap, quick, and easy modification. After explaining the reasons for studding only the rear tires (studded front tires interfered with the steering), he added that “A scientifically lesser, yet far cooler reason for the studded tires is the bad-ass Mad Max look they give the dogs, a sure-fire hit with the crowds!”
Another student used something called “whegs.” Take a tiny wheel, attach three arcs of a somewhat stiff material to the wheel with one end of each arc radiating outward, and attach another material in a circle around all three arcs. It may be hard to visualize, but these “whegs” can climb over obstacles up to 75 percent as high as the wheel diameter.
Students need to be flexible, since any particular construction project can run into a whole series of problems. What if the wheels don’t fit? Will there be enough power in the toy’s own locomotion system to adapt to the new one, or will it need a new motor too? Would it make more sense to use three or four wheels? Is the new system too powerful? One student had an issue with his pet's new locomotion system actually deforming the plastic, and had to put in a metal plate.
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