Parasitic Robot Steers Live Turtle With Tasty Snacks

It's going to be a long, long time before we have amphibious robots that are anywhere near as capable as the mighty and majestic turtle. While many roboticists are working diligently on TurtleBots of all kinds, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have taken things much more literally with the development of a robot-turtle hybrid: a "parasitic robot," as they call it, that lives on the back of a real turtle, guiding the animal from place to place with the aid of an array of LEDs coupled with positive reinforcement from tasty turtle snacks. Animals have the benefit of millions of years of evolution, which has carefully optimized their design towards versatile and efficient locomotion. Robots have been around for not quite that long, and they suffer from all kinds of specific limitations as well as a sort of general comic ineptitude that keeps them from being useful most of the time, especially when try to do basic, simple tasks that animals excel at. In a recent paper in the Journal of Bionic Engineering, the KAIST researchers argue that animal-robot hybrids "could provide an alternative solution to some of the limitations of conventional mobile robot systems in various fields."