3/12/2024 0 Comments Squirrel catapult into pondThis surprising behavior, and a demonstration that robots with tails that act similarly also can successfully recover from crash landings, will be reported this week in the Nature journal Communications Biology. With the fall-arresting reflex happening so fast, only slow motion video could reveal the underlying mechanism." "They crash headfirst, pitch back head over heels at an extreme angle from the vertical - they look like a bookstand sticking away from the tree - anchored only by their rear legs and tail as they dissipate the impact energy. "Far from stalling, some of these lizards are still accelerating upon impact," Jusufi said. The videos show that when this gecko - the common Asian flat-tailed house gecko, Hemidactylus platyurus - collides head-on with a tree, it grabs the trunk with its clawed and padded toes so that, as its head and shoulders rebound, it has leverage to press its tail against the trunk to prevent itself from tumbling backward onto the ground and potentially ending up as someone's dinner. Before take-off, they would move their head up-and-down, and side-to-side to view the landing target prior to jumping off, as if to estimate the travel distance," Jusufi said. "Observing the geckos from elevation in the rainforest canopy was eye-opening. He clocked their speed upon impact at about 6 meters per second, or 21 kilometers per hour - more than 200 feet per second, or about 120 gecko body lengths per second. Those head-first crashes are probably not the geckos' preferred landing, but Jusufi documented many such hard landings in 37 glides over several field seasons in a Singapore rainforest, using high-speed video cameras to record their trajectories and wince-inducing landings. Many of these techniques have been implemented in agile, gecko-like robots.īut Robert Full, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, and Ardian Jusufi, faculty member at the Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems and former UC Berkeley doctoral student, were blown away by a recent discovery: Geckos also use their tails to help recover when they take a header into a tree. It took about three hours to build (not counting the trips to Home Depot) and does not include any difficult cuts (all straight cuts) or elaborate tools.In more than 15 years of research on geckos, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and, more recently, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, have shown that geckos use their tails to maneuver in midair when gliding between trees, to right themselves when falling, to keep from falling off a tree when they lose their grip and even to propel themselves across the surface of a pond, as if walking on water. The design is not pretty but it is very functional and that's really all a 5 year old cares about anyway. I am not a master craftsman, just trying to be a Hero Dad* for my boys so look past the low grade finishing and more so on the end result. His catapult looked simple enough so I thought I'd make a step-by-step with some improvements (that's the American way right? - and the Japanese way for that matter). This is a catapult (ala torsion style) I built inspired from the video a contributor named schoondogs posted.
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