How do animals walk without falling over? A multi-university research effort led by UC Berkeley will try to answer that question by studying a small robot that imitates cockroach locomotion. Berkeley biologist Robert Full’s insights into animal movement have informed the design of other robots as well, including the wall-climbing Mecho-Gecko. By simultaneously studying the cockroach-bot and various insects, the researchers hope to identify the muscular and neural networks that result in the whole-body motion of a wide range of animals, including humans.
“The robot has to operate in the real world, like the animal does, so we can use it for testing hypotheses,” Full said. “We know, for example, that the body’s center of mass bounces along like a pogo stick, which is embodied in the robot, but we don’t know how its parts – its legs, feet, actuators or muscles – sum up to give that remarkably general pattern of movement. Now we can ask questions like, ‘What if you had a more compliant leg? What if you had two joints in that leg, what does that give you versus one joint?'”
