Skip to main content

Robot uses its tail the same way Indiana Jones cracks his trusty bullwhip

Using a compliant, unactuated tail to manipulate objects
In the Indiana Jones movies, the titular hero uses his trusty bullwhip for a variety of tasks — from punishing evildoers to pulling levers from across the room to moving objects at a distance. That same idea — minus the evildoers part — is now driving researchers at Texas A&M University, who recently published a paper on a robot that uses a “compliant, unactuated tail to manipulate objects.”

“There has been an increasing amount of interest in robots that don’t look like the stereotypical rigid, Wizard of Oz Tin Man-style machine,” Dylan Shell, associate professor of computer science and engineering, told Digital Trends. “In my lab, we’ve were thinking a lot about everything you can do with a flexible structure. I thought of this particular mechanism while I was tying my shoelaces. If you look around you, there are a lot of tools that humans use which depend on rope, twine, strings, and tools of that nature.”

Related Videos
robotcar

Working with Ph.D. student Young-Ho Kim, Shell attached a bullwhip-inspired “flexible rope-like structure” to a remote control car to investigate its various use cases. The concept explores the mathematical properties of such tools, which requires working out data concerning tension and mass in real time — and figuring out how to use them to move objects through either harsh whipping movements or slower dragging ones.

“The idea was to have a tail which, depending on how fast you move, can either be flexible or somewhat rigid, and you can play with that dynamic,” Shell said. “Our paper concerns the reasoning about how to use such an appendage. If you’re trying to get an object from point A to point B as quickly as possible, you can use a combination between coarse and finer movements to move it. The robot is able to optimize that route planning to take advantage of its different abilities.”

Going forward, Shell plans to explore concepts like multiple robots working together, with the ability to combine different tails in order to carry out conjoined collaboration tasks. “It would be possible scoop up objects, for instance,” Shell said.

Right now, there are no immediate plans for this unique robot to find its way into the real world. But who knows? With octopus and worm robots all the rage right now, who’s to say a bullwhip-inspired machine isn’t the next big thing?

“I think this could certainly be a flexible tool in both senses of the word,” Shell concluded.

Editors' Recommendations

ChatGPT has a new way to detect its own plagiarism
The ChatGPT chatbot by OpenAIis now available for testing as a as a free research preview this week.

OpenAI announced on Tuesday a new tool called AI Text Classifier, which is intended to distinguish between AI-generated text and words that were written by a human.

The brand's latest tool comes after criticism of its ChatGPT text generator. While it has been popular since its November 2022 release, the chatbot has been embroiled in plagiarism concerns, with the tool already being banned from schools. However, reports have also surfaced of students using ChatGPT to create essays for take-home assignments.

Read more
Amazing Atlas robot shows it’s almost ready for work
Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot.

We already know that Atlas can dance, somersault, and do parkour, but seeing it carrying out tasks on a construction site -- or something set up as a construction site -- shows us how the bipedal robot could one day be usefully deployed in the workplace.

In the latest video released by the robot wizards at Boston Dynamics, Atlas is shown assisting a human construction worker in the most remarkable way.

Read more
Laptop displays got way better this year, and I can prove it
Lenovo ThinkBook 16p Gen 3 front view showing display.

I've noticed for a couple of years that laptop displays have been improving. And it's not just the advent of new technologies like OLED and mini-LED. I'm talking about the tried-and-true IPS panel, which remains the most prevalent display technology on most laptops we've reviewed.

Fortunately, we maintain a database of quantitative laptop data that can help shed light on the following question: are laptop displays really getting better, or does it just seem to be the case? While the following data isn't scientific, it's close enough for us to draw some conclusions about just how much better laptops have been getting.
Brighter, deeper contrast, and more accurate colors

Read more