About the Cover
Cover
The six-legged walking machine on the cover is similar to the walking stick watching nearby, in that both can traverse an irregular, unstable terrain with a relatively undisturbed gait. More to the point, the gait in both "organisms" is generated by a control system that is remarkably decentralized; that is, each leg has its own controller, and the gait is an emergent property of interactions between them and the physical properties of the legs and the environment. The characteristics of the control system for the robot (named TARRY2) were inspired by investigations of the walking stick Carausius morosus by Josef Schmitz and his colleagues at the University of Bielefeld (Germany); these studies are described in this issue (pp. 195-200).
The paper by Schmitz et al. is part of the proceedings of a workshop entitled Invertebrate Sensory Information Processing: Implications for Biologically Inspired Autonomous Systems (see p. 145). The workshop was sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies in the Space Life Sciences and held in April 2000 at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The participants included scientists from the fields of invertebrate sensory biology, sensory guided behavior, and biologically inspired robotics. They asked how complex invertebrates process sensory data and use it to cope with dynamic environments, and they also evaluated the performance of automatons built to emulate those animals and their behaviors.
The photograph of TARRY2 was taken by Martin Guddat (University of Duisburg, Germany). In real life, this biomimetic robot is 50 cm long, spans 50 cm, and weighs 3 kg. The stick insect, in contrast, was only 8 cm long (without its 2-cm antennae), spanned 5 cm, and weighed 1 g; its photographer was Josef Schmitz. The composite image on the cover was produced by Beth Liles at the MBL.
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Copyright © 2003 by the Marine Biological Laboratory.
