swumanoid
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Inhabitat's Week in Green: 30-foot 'Buckyball', Olympic stadium Lego replica and the 'Mantabot'
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. Building a robot that can stand and walk on two legs like a human is challenging enough -- but what about a robot that swims like a human? A team from Tokyo University of Technology has created the Swumanoid, a swimming robot that's based on the physique of a human swimmer and can swim a variety of strokes. But why should a swimming robot have to look like a person? Most fish swim much faster, more gracefully and more efficiently than humans. That's why scientists from the University of Virginia are developing the Mantabot, a robot that looks and swims like a ray.
Humanoid bot created to analyze mechanics of swimming, replace unreliable carbon-based life forms
Meet Swumanoid. He's the replacement Tokyo Institute of Technology researchers have whipped up for pesky earthlings who can't identically repeat tests or minutely change their swimming style. The bot can reproduce a swimmer's full body movement and measure water resistance in an effort to shed some light on the forces acting on creatures like Michael Phelps. Created with 3D printed parts of an inferior human swimmer at half scale, it's attached to a drive unit and confined to a circulating water tank; Swumanoid takes two minutes and thirty-six seconds to swim roughly 300 feet, so it'll be a while before he and his kin chase you down. In the meantime, you can watch nightmare fueling footage of the bot presumably training for the Ironman Triathlon after the break.
