Infi-Zeal's Blog

Cockroaches are way faster than you and me. Relative to their body weight, they can flee at the equivalent of hundreds of miles per hour and are gone long before your newspaper hits the floor. But researchers from the University of California at Berkeley recently described how cockroaches can also run toward a ledge and then flip around to its underside in the blink of an eye, effectively disappearing from predators. Now they're working on robots that can do the same. Geckos can also perform this escape act, which involves using the hind legs as anchors on the ledge while the body swings under it. "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," Jean-Michel Mongeau of UC Berkeley's biophysics group and coll...

When engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight. Even though the wings significantly improved the running performance of the 10-centimeter-long robot -- called DASH, short for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod -- they found that the extra boost would not have generated enough speed to launch the critter from the ground. The wing flapping also enhanced the aerial performance of the robot, consistent with the hypothesis that flight originated in gliding tree-dwellers. The research team, led by Ron Fearing, professor of electrical engineering and head of the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley, reports its conclusions online on Oct. 18, in the peer-reviewed journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics . Using robot models could play a useful role in studying the origins of flight, particularly since fossil evidence is so ...