Coming soon: Hairy Robots

[FSogol]

"Even the faintest optical and tactile feedback sources gathered by the most humble insects will efficiently coordinate their moves at striking speed, without relying on a lot of processing, at least much less than what engineers tend to pack into your typical autonomous robot. That is because their locomotive action is often directly coupled to sensory feedback, with no such thing as central processing or environment data analytics from multiple data sources.

A lot of insects and certain mammals have whiskers - in effect hair-like tactile sensors that help them monitor wind and navigate around obstacles in tight spaces. This was a new source of inspiration for researchers at Berkeley Lab who have recently demonstrated electronic whiskers (e-whiskers) based on a mixture of carbon nanotubes (CNT) and silver nanoparticles coated on flexible and high aspect-ratio polymer fibres."



Whole article by Julien Happich of Engineering Design News here:

http://edn.com/electronics-blogs/tech-edge/4427795/E-whiskers-could-turn-robots-hairy?cid=nl_edn&elq=fe2d2bd596764e608b65298d856e9c95&elqCampaignId=15072

[el_bryanto]

1. New Theory - Big Foot is a robot sent from the future to gather information on Forests.

Pacific Northwest Forests. In the year 2130 those forests are gone, but it's believed they can be revived with the proper data; so a furry robot is sent back to tramp around and collect data, which is transmitted to the future.

Bryant

[FSogol]

2. Perfect!

[longship]

3. You win the Internets!

R&K on your response alone.