Mar 19, 2025 08:00 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 19, 2025 08:02 PM by C C.)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1077176
INTRO: Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches.
University of California, Berkeley, biologists and engineers are trying to remedy that situation. Based on studies of the biomechanics of squirrel leaps and landings, they have designed a hopping robot that can stick a landing on a narrow perch.
The feat, to be reported in the March 19 issue of the journal Science Robotics, is a big step in the design of more agile robots, ones that can leap among the trusses and girders of buildings under construction or robots that can monitor the environment in tangled forests or tree canopies.
"The robots we have now are OK, but how do you take it to the next level? How do you get robots to navigate a challenging environment in a disaster where you have pipes and beams and wires? Squirrels could do that, no problem. Robots can't do that," said Robert Full, one of paper’s senior authors and a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley.
"Squirrels are nature's best athletes,” Full added. “The way that they can maneuver and escape is unbelievable. The idea is to try to define the control strategies that give the animals a wide range of behavioral options to perform extraordinary feats and use that information to build more agile robots."
Justin Yim, a former UC Berkeley graduate student and co-first author of the paper, translated what Full and his biology students discovered in squirrels to Salto, a one-legged robot developed at UC Berkeley in 2016 that could already hop and parkour and stick a landing, but only on flat ground. The challenge was to stick the landing while hitting a specific point — a narrow rod.
"If you think about trying to jump to a point — maybe you're doing something like playing hopscotch and you want to land your feet in a certain spot — you want to stick that landing and not take a step," explained Yim, now an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC). "If you feel like you're going to fall over forward, then you might pinwheel your arms, but you'll also probably stand up straight in order to keep yourself from falling over. If it feels like you're falling backward and you might have to sit down because you're not going to be able to quite make it, you might pinwheel your arms backward, but you're likely also to crouch down as you do this. That is the same behavior that we programmed into the robot. If it's going to be swinging under, it should crouch. If it's going to swing over, it should extend out and stand tall."
Using these strategies, Yim is embarking on a NASA-funded project to design a small, one-legged robot that could explore Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, where the gravity is one-eightieth that of Earth, and a single hop could carry the robot the length of a football field.
The new robot design is based on a biomechanical analysis of squirrel landings detailed in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Biology and posted online Feb. 27. Full is senior author and former graduate student Sebastian Lee is first author of that paper..... (MORE - details, no ads)
INTRO: Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches.
University of California, Berkeley, biologists and engineers are trying to remedy that situation. Based on studies of the biomechanics of squirrel leaps and landings, they have designed a hopping robot that can stick a landing on a narrow perch.
The feat, to be reported in the March 19 issue of the journal Science Robotics, is a big step in the design of more agile robots, ones that can leap among the trusses and girders of buildings under construction or robots that can monitor the environment in tangled forests or tree canopies.
"The robots we have now are OK, but how do you take it to the next level? How do you get robots to navigate a challenging environment in a disaster where you have pipes and beams and wires? Squirrels could do that, no problem. Robots can't do that," said Robert Full, one of paper’s senior authors and a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley.
"Squirrels are nature's best athletes,” Full added. “The way that they can maneuver and escape is unbelievable. The idea is to try to define the control strategies that give the animals a wide range of behavioral options to perform extraordinary feats and use that information to build more agile robots."
Justin Yim, a former UC Berkeley graduate student and co-first author of the paper, translated what Full and his biology students discovered in squirrels to Salto, a one-legged robot developed at UC Berkeley in 2016 that could already hop and parkour and stick a landing, but only on flat ground. The challenge was to stick the landing while hitting a specific point — a narrow rod.
"If you think about trying to jump to a point — maybe you're doing something like playing hopscotch and you want to land your feet in a certain spot — you want to stick that landing and not take a step," explained Yim, now an assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC). "If you feel like you're going to fall over forward, then you might pinwheel your arms, but you'll also probably stand up straight in order to keep yourself from falling over. If it feels like you're falling backward and you might have to sit down because you're not going to be able to quite make it, you might pinwheel your arms backward, but you're likely also to crouch down as you do this. That is the same behavior that we programmed into the robot. If it's going to be swinging under, it should crouch. If it's going to swing over, it should extend out and stand tall."
Using these strategies, Yim is embarking on a NASA-funded project to design a small, one-legged robot that could explore Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, where the gravity is one-eightieth that of Earth, and a single hop could carry the robot the length of a football field.
The new robot design is based on a biomechanical analysis of squirrel landings detailed in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Biology and posted online Feb. 27. Full is senior author and former graduate student Sebastian Lee is first author of that paper..... (MORE - details, no ads)