![]() ![]() collides head-on with a tree, it grabs the trunk with its clawed and padded toes so that, as its head and shoulders rebound, it has leverage to press its tail against the trunk to prevent itself from tumbling backward onto the ground and potentially ending up as someone’s dinner. The videos show that when this gecko - the common Asian flat-tailed house gecko, Before take-off, they would move their head up-and-down, and side-to-side to view the landing target prior to jumping off, as if to estimate the travel distance,” Jusufi said.Īrdian Jusufi explains how he and his team discovered the unique behavior of the Asian flat-tailed house gecko, and designed and built a robot to understand the biological function and improve the perching ability of soft robots. “Observing the geckos from elevation in the rainforest canopy was eye-opening. He clocked their speed upon impact at about 6 meters per second, or 21 kilometers per hour - more than 200 feet per second, or about 120 gecko body lengths per second. Those head-first crashes are probably not the geckos’ preferred landing, but Jusufi documented many such hard landings in 37 glides over several field seasons in a Singapore rainforest, using high-speed video cameras to record their trajectories and wince-inducing landings. , faculty member at the Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems and former UC Berkeley doctoral student, were blown away by a recent discovery: Geckos also use their tails to help recover when they take a header into a tree. ![]() Many of these techniques have been implemented in agile, gecko-like robots.īut Robert Full, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, and In more than 15 years of research on geckos, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and, more recently, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, have shown that geckos use their tails to maneuver in midair when gliding between trees, to right themselves when falling, to keep from falling off a tree when they lose their grip and even to propel themselves across the surface of a pond, as if walking on water. (Photos by Ardian Jusufi, illustration by Andre Wee)Ī gecko’s tail is a wondrous and versatile thing. ![]() Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany built a soft robot with an active tail to replicate this behavior. The Asian flat-tailed house gecko would prefer to execute a four-point landing after leaping to a tree trunk, but if it can’t slow down sufficiently, it may have to crash headfirst into the trunk, rebounding but stabilizing itself with its tail. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |