Mechanical Animals

Introduction

My writing takes two forms, creations and observations on things that exist where I just report about them. Sometimes the two blur a little and maybe that is what this is. I also like to share things with friends and my Vocal audience, that they may be unaware of and may actually find interesting.

Many years ago I started watching TED talks on my tablet (it might have been an iPad or some Android thing, I now have a Kindle Fire) and there is a hell of a lot of interesting videos on there.

TED now how a Youtube Channel so I am going to share videos from there but the TED site is here. It is well worth subscribing to.

So I remembered a couple of mechanical animals that appeared on the TED site and they absolutely amaze me still.

You really need to watch the videos that I am sharing here to really appreciate this piece. These are what I am sharing with you my friends and I am sure that you will be just as impressed as I was and still am today.

So here we go with the first one, a mechanical bird.

Markus Fischer's Mechanical Bird

This is from the video.

Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird. That is, until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird, a large, lightweight robot, modeled on a seagull, that flies by flapping its wings. A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011.

I was stunned by how this effectively clockwork construction could be programmed to fly as required, but more impressed that they could actually build a robot that could actually fly.

Birds amaze me but have muscle and a light skeleton and feathers and an aerodynamic shape that allows them to fly. Fischerer's robot is mechanical and clockwork and still flies.

Vijay Kumar's: Robots that can fly ... and cooperate!

From the video:

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

These are not quite the same as Markus Fischer's bird but these are incredibly agile flying robots that work with each other using ants as an example using implicit coordination.

About ten minutes in you see twenty of these robots flying in formation inside, to work together and the construction sequence is jaw-dropping.

Theo Jansen' Creations. A new form of life? Strandbeest

From the video

Artist Theo Jansen demonstrates the amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures he builds from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles. His creatures are designed to move -- and even survive -- on their own.

These "creatures" are constructed and the intention is that will live on beaches feeding off and being driven by the wind. They are on the beach but avoid the water so there is programmed intelligence in there.

These are even more impressive to me than Markus Fischer's bird or Vijay Kumar's flying robots.

Watching these "creatures" will amaze you and you are likely to be as captured as I was with these creations.

Theo shows you the brain of the creature and explains how it works.

This video is not from TED but from Theo's Youtube channel.

Numerous specimens of the Strandbeest evolution with the music of Khachaturian's Spartacus. It opens the archives of fossils. Theo Jansen's work since 1990. He tries to make new forms of life on beaches. His animals get their energy from the wind so they don't have to eat. In the future, he wants to put them in herds.

The Youtube channel is here

The website is here

Conclusion.

I hope you have enjoyed these "creatures". As I said one of the reasons I write is to share things that I find like this.

I have not included any music because I hope you will spend some of your time watching the videos.