When it’s time to design new robots, sometimes the best inspiration can come from Mother Nature. Take, for example, her creepy, but incredibly athletic spider crickets.
Johns Hopkins engineering students and their professor have spent more than eight months unraveling the hopping skills, airborne antics, and safe-landing patterns of these pesky insects that commonly lurk in the dark corners of damp basements.
The team, which hopes to pave the way for a new generation of small but skillful jumping robots, will present its findings Nov. 23 during a poster session in Boston at the 68th annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics.
The Johns Hopkins team members believe non-human creatures may be the best models in designing mechanical helpers to carry out certain important tasks. Figuring out how critters move, they say, could lead to planetary rovers that crawl like caterpillars or winged drones that hover like hummingbirds.
So what useful design tips did the researchers manage to glean from these spindly six-legged bugs? For one thing, they were able to use high-speed video cameras to collect tantalizing clues about how these tiny wingless creatures can somehow leap a distance equal to about 60 times their body length. That’s a feat far beyond what any human track star could accomplish. An adult human who wanted to replicate the cricket’s leap would have to jump 300 feet—nearly the length of a football field. And, most times, spider crickets manage to land safely on their feet. How, the researchers wanted to know, can these tiny bugs accomplish this?
“Because they don’t have wings, the main things they use during their ‘flight’ to stabilize their posture is their limbs,” said Emily Palmer, a sophomore mechanical engineering major in the university’s Whiting School of Engineering who is doing much of the testing. “We’re looking at the way the spider crickets move their bodies and move their limbs to stabilize their posture during a jump.”
Excerpted from The Hub. Read the complete story here.