Achievement

IGERT sponsored biologists and engineers discovered a novel behavior in small runners that facilitates their escape by disappearance from predators. Cockroaches and geckos ran rapidly toward a 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, disappearing from an overhead view. Geckos in nature can run over fern leaves, engage their claws, and possibly their adhesive toe hairs, near the leaf tip to perform a pendulum-like swing toward the underside. This rapid inversion behavior inspired design advancements of a small hexapedal robot that begins to demonstrate this capability. Quantification of acrobatic behaviors in small animals will continue to provide biological inspiration resulting in small, highly mobile sentinel and search-and-rescue robots that assist us during natural and human-made disasters.