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Crickets Inspire Stealthy Robots to Fire Rings of Air
Courtesy of Andy Russell
Monash University's Andy Russell used the African cave cricket, Phaeophilacris spectrum, as inspiration for creating stealth communication between robots. The African cave cricket communicates by firing rings of high-pressure air, like invisible smoke rings, as a signal that it is ready to mate. There is no need for the pair to worry about predators because the series of vortex rings, which can travel for long distances, are silent.
Russell reports that a pair of robots have used coded sequences of vortex rings to communicate. He used a loudspeaker cone to project air through a two-centimeter aperture on one robot to create a vortex ring, and it was detected 30 centimeters away by a pressure sensor on a second robot. Using a binary code, one ASCII character was sent and decoded every four seconds.
"Like the cave crickets, there may be times when a robot does not want its communications intercepted," Russell says.
From New Scientist
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