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Festo's eMotionButterfly, AirJelly And AirPenguin Robots
Ah, Festo, how we enjoy your creative robotics!
(Festo's eMotionButterfly, AirJelly And AirPenguin Robots)
At the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C., Festo, a German industrial automation company, brought along some of its incredible robotic animals for a rare public display.We stopped by the Festo booth to check them out. In an abandoned ballroom upstairs, Festo’s chief pilot, Markus Schäffer, showed off three of the company’s spectacular flying robots: eMotionButterfly, AirJelly, and AirPenguin.
Festo uses robots like these to explore creative ways in which nature can be used as an inspiration for improvements in technology.
These amazing biomimicry robotics remind me of the boppers from Wetware, a 1988 novel by Rudy Rucker:
In the shaft's great, vertical tunnel, bright beings darted through the hot light; odd-shaped living machines that glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. These were the boppers; self-reproducing robots who obeyed no man. Some looked humanoid, some looked like spiders, some looked like snakes, some looked like bats...
I'd also mention the artificial butterflies from Changeling by Roger Zelazny.
Via IEEE Spectrum.
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