Skip to main content
The Phoenix Files
Community Digital Archives of Olin College

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Browse Digital Objects
  • About This Collection

Rapid Inversion: Running Animals and Robots Swing like a Pendulum under Ledges

  1. Home
Pages: 1 of
In Faculty Publications

Title

Rapid Inversion: Running Animals and Robots Swing like a Pendulum under Ledges

Author(s)

Mongeau, Jean-Michel
McRae, Brian
Jusufi, Ardian
Birkmeyer, Paul
Hoover, Aaron M.
Fearing, Ronald

Description

Escaping from predators often demands that animals rapidly negotiate complex environments. The smallest animals attain relatively fast speeds with high frequency leg cycling, wing flapping or body undulations, but absolute speeds are slow compared to larger animals. Instead, small animals benefit from the advantages of enhanced maneuverability in part due to scaling. Here, we report a novel behavior in small, legged runners that may facilitate their escape by disappearance from predators. We video recorded cockroaches and geckos rapidly running up an incline toward a ledge, digitized their motion and created a simple model to generalize the behavior. Both species ran rapidly at 12–15 body lengths-per-second toward the ledge without braking, dove off the ledge, attached their feet by claws like a grappling hook, and used a pendulum-like motion that can exceed one meter-per-second to swing around to an inverted position under the ledge, out of sight. We discovered geckos in Southeast Asia can execute this escape behavior in the field. Quantification of these acrobatic behaviors provides biological inspiration toward the design of small, highly mobile search-and-rescue robots that can assist us during natural and human-made disasters. We report the first steps toward this new capability in a small, hexapedal robot.

Date Published

2018-03-26 15:06:22

Files

  • Download Geckos.pdf

Rights Statements

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Linked Data for this Object

Wikidata subjects
animal physiology inversion running swinging pendulum

User login

  • Reset your password
Olin College of Engineering

An undergraduate engineering institution exploring innovative approaches to engineering education since its founding in 1997.

1000 Olin Way
Needham, MA 02492
781.292.2390