Effecting a breakthrough in making insect-inspired robots run faster, Swiss researchers, led by an Indian-origin scientist, have found a new way by which six-legged insects increase their walking speed.<\/p>\n
\nSix-legged insects run fastest using a three-legged, or “tripod” gait where they have three legs on the ground at all times — two on one side of their body and one on the other.<\/p>\n
Researchers at University of Lausanne and \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne in Switzerland revealed that there was a faster way for six-legged robots to locomote on flat ground, provided they don’t have the adhesive pads used by insects to climb walls and ceilings.<\/p>\n
In the findings, published in Nature Communications, the designers of insect-inspired robots broke away with the tripod-gait paradigm and consider “bipod” gait as other possibility of locomotor strategy.<\/p>\n
“We wanted to determine why insects use a tripod gait and identify whether it is, indeed, the fastest way for six-legged animals and robots to walk,” said Pavan Ramdya, co-lead and corresponding author of the study.<\/p>\n
The scientists carried out a host of computer simulations, tests on robots and experiments on Drosophila melanogaster — the most commonly studied insect in biology.<\/p>\n
They found that the common insect tripod gait did emerge when they optimised their insect model to climb vertical surfaces with adhesion on the tips of its legs.<\/p>\n
By contrast, simulations of ground-walking without the adhesiveness of insects’ legs revealed that bipod gaits, where only two legs are on the ground at any given time, are faster and more efficient — although in nature no insects actually walk this way.<\/p>\n
“Our findings support the idea that insects use a tripod gait to most effectively walk on surfaces in three dimensions and also because their legs have adhesive properties,” said Ramdya.<\/p>\n
The researchers then built a six-legged robot capable of employing either the tripod or bipod gait and found that the bipod gait was faster, corroborating the simulation algorithms’ results.<\/p>\n
Finally, the experimenters examined flies and it was found that when their claws and adhesive pads were covered, the flies quickly began to use bipod-like leg coordination similar to the one found in robots.\u2014IANS<\/p>\n
Image:\u00a0EPFL<\/p>\n
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Effecting a breakthrough in making insect-inspired robots run faster, Swiss researchers, led by an Indian-origin scientist, have found a new way by which six-legged insects increase their walking speed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[43],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3090,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions\/3090"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}