Congratulations to Professor Rajat Mittal, Emily Palmer (B.S., MechE ’18), and their team members, whose research on the aerodynamic nature of cricket leaps has been showcased in The Baltimore Sun!
Excerpt from the article:
In a project some on campus call “Tiny Dancers,” he and about a dozen students at the Whiting School of Engineering have been using high-speed cameras to capture and illustrate the hundreds of stages spider crickets pass through as they soar.
The images have allowed the team to measure the movements of the insects’ limbs at each stage and develop mathematical models of the drag forces acting on their bodies.
The data they’re collecting, Mittal said, could illustrate the dynamic principles by which engineers could one day create microscale robots to traverse highly irregular surfaces — navigating the rubble after an earthquake, for example, or the surface of a newly discovered planet.