Students from the University of Adelaide (Australia) developed a ‘spider’ robot that will allow them to complete a 3D scan of the Naracoorte Caves, located in southeastern Australia and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The CaveX project came about after a PhD student, Craig Williams, found it difficult to complete the 3D model of the caves because he could not collect enough data with his old scanner. At that moment he approached the engineering department. “We were looking forward to our honors project and we put together a team of like-minded people who we thought would work well together and that consolidated our five members for the CaveX project,” team member Matthew King was quoted as saying. ABC.
A “nature-inspired” design
The team started work this year and went through a selection process of 15 models before choosing the current one. According to Hayden Lee, another member, many ideas came up but had to be discarded because they meant potential damage to the site. The six-legged robot “is inspired by nature,” he noted. “The solution (to avoid potential damage) would be to take the legs that the insects use to move and integrate them into the design, “he said.
Following their design and build selection, the team spent a weekend in the caves testing the function of the artifact. “He’s been able to walk through uneven terrain in multiple steps, he’s been able to map the surrounding areas and build that map from multiple scans,” Lee said.
For his part, the ideologue behind the project was satisfied: “It shows that we are getting some of those areas where I couldn’t get data,” Williams said.
As for CaveX’s next steps, Williams said they are “looking at the surface of the cave to find new entrances to it that hopefully will lead to new fossil deposits“, which will improve the range of knowledge about the fossils that exist in the cave.
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