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MIRKO KOVAČ, MSc
The New Scientist article
Mechanical locomotion principles from jumping insects applied to
microrobots said
Taking its inspiration from the grasshopper, a tiny two-legged robot
that stores elastic energy in springs has leaped 27 times its own
height, smashing the record of 17 times set by a previous
robot.
Its creators hope that swarms of such hopping robots could spread out to
explore disaster areas, or even the surfaces of other
planets.
The robot is only 5 centimetres tall, and weighs just 7 grams. A motor
designed to power the vibration unit of a pager drives a system of gears
that gradually wind two metal springs.
Hopping provides an effective way for tiny robots to get around on rough
terrain, says
Dario Floreano, who worked on the robot with colleague
Mirko Kovac.
Mirko Kovač, MSc is PhD Candidate at the Laboratory of
Intelligent
Systems
at EPFL where he is focusing on biomimetic hybrid
locomotion concepts for small robots. He is developing a novel
palm-sized
robot of around 10g that can move on ground or walls, jump, recover from
any position in air, and perform goal directed gliding flight.
Mirko coauthored
A miniature 7g jumping robot,
Towards the Self Deploying Microglider, a biomimetic jumping and
gliding robot,
A 1.5g SMA-actuated Microglider looking for the Light,
Towards the Self Deploying Microglider; Gliding Flight and
Bioinspired
Wing Folding Mechanism, and
Self Deploying Microglider.
Mirko focuses on the synthesis of biologically inspired structures and
locomotion principles for small mobile robots and on how to use these
robots as physical models to answer biological questions.
He earned his MSc at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
(ETHZ) in Mechanical Engineering after completing his
Master Thesis at the University of California in Berkeley in 2005 with
the title "Micro and Nano Scale Flow around Biological Cells".
He was research collaborator at CISERV in Singapore and WARTSILA in
Winterthur, Switzerland.
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