Robot Science Discovers Prehensile Tails Are Prehensile, Provide Balance
January 4th, 2012 by SB
Photo of Tailbot and Velociraptors courtesy Livescience.com
Also, lizards are awesome:
The investigators found the lizards swung their tails to correct for errors made at launch. For instance, slippery surfaces made their feet skid, but the reptiles corrected for such anomalies with appropriate tail movements in mid-air.
To help confirm their findings, the scientists produced a lizard-size wheeled robot named “Tailbot” that had an aluminum tail and could leap like a ski jumper from a ramp. During each jump, the robot’s front wheels, which left the ramp first, started falling while the rear ones were still on the ramp, causing the machine to tilt downward. To avoid a nosedive into the landing pad, Tailbot corrected the angle of its body before landing by using tail movements controlled by feedback from an onboard gyroscope.
Here’s more on Tailbot and other work from Bob Full’s PolyPedal biomimetic robot lab at UC Berkeley.
Bio-inspired robots are always inspiring, especially when we can put into quantitative data why an animal is designed that way.
[Via KQEDScience from The Christian Science Monitor]
