BioMotion Science: Leapin’ Lizards, Grippin Geckos adn Compressed Cockroaches Inspire the Next Generation of Robots

BioMotion Science: Leapin’ Lizards, Gripping Geckos and Compressed Cockroaches Inspire the Next Generation of Robots

Professor Robert J. Full, Ph.D.Chancellor’s Professor of Integrative BiologyUniversity of California, Berkeley

Zoom Presentation: https://zoom.us/recording/play/xAed7F2DRyiUCcjdN0Fwj4HS7Jp_5Vsc9p-8YSk6tgxfM4RPhzsFYT7ZqUkYtDfZ

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Abstract: BioMotion solutions are remarkably diverse and inspirational, but equally complex. Fortunately, common patterns have led to the discovery of general principles represented by simple models. Animals manage energy using the principles of pendulums, pogo sticks, and balance poles with amazing feet, spring-like legs and swinging tails. Animals are inseparable from their environment. A new field of terradynamics has emerged to explain terrestrial locomotion in the natural environment where feet allow running over complex media, burrowing, and climbing. Robustness in nature far exceeds any machine with respect to being fail-safe and fault tolerant. New manufacturing techniques based on exoskeletons have allowed the first generation of soft robots that can rival animals, persist, and begin to go everywhere. Unfortunately, robots are stupid, but animals employ cognition in their biomechanics in still unknown ways.

Bio: Bob Full is the Chancellor’s Professor in Integrative Biology, Director of Poly-PEDAL Lab, Director of Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration Integrative Biomechanics in Education and Research (CiBER), and Director of CiBER-IGERT Traineeship Program.