Robotics Development in Animals: German Engineers Create Bionic Kangaroo

A team of German engineers at Festo, a leading worldwide supplier of automation technology, has developed a bionic kangaroo that mirrors the real-life animal's capabilities of jumping and regaining its balance.

Just like the real marsupial, the German-engineered bionic kangaroo recovers energy during its landing to prepare for its next jump. The robot is operated by gesture control, in which the operator wears an armband and makes hand movements to the kangaroo. The signals are sent through Bluetooth, and the robot responds and jumps up to 40 centimeters in the air toward the motioned target.

Festo's bionic kangaroo was developed after two years of research. Engineers were able to mimic the real animal's hop. The robotic animal is a meter tall, weighs seven kilograms, and can jump up to distances of 80 centimeters. This is not the first robotic animal project that Festo has undertaken, either. Previous developments include robotic penguins, seagulls, and jellyfish.

The Bionic Learning Network is a cooperation between Festo and renowned universities, institutes, and development companies; they seek to improve industrial technology through applying aspects from nature. The bionic kangaroo helps explain a real kangaroo's movements and capabilities with the utilization of a highly dynamic system.

Its development is not yet a product for the open market. The developers' goal was to show aspiring young engineers the power of Biomimetics: applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields, as stated in this National Geographic article. How can the study of nature improve our everyday developments? Well, Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, studied the iridescence in butterflies and beetles as well as the antireflective coatings in moth eyes. The time spent doing that has most likely helped you in your everyday life, because it has helped create brighter screens for cell phones.

The bionic kangaroo development is perhaps less ubiquitous than Parker's study of butterflies, beetles, and moths, but it emulated energy-efficient jump kinematics based on a natural model. This shows that engineering has the ability to study and examine nearly anything on the planet.

To read more about the Bionic Learning Network and Festo's robotic kangaroo, visit this Guardian news article.