Geckos' ability to coordinate joint angles on limbs may help improve robots' gait

Washington, November 20 : A team of researchers used a 3-D locomotion video-recording and measuring system to observe and measure the angular rotation of joints in gecko's limbs, as they ran on horizontal floor and climbing on vertical wall.

Scientists at Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering (IBSS), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA) believe that their work may help understand gecko's locomotion from the view point of angle change of joints, and provide a direct reference to plan the gait of gecko-robots.

Geckos' excellent locomotion abilities to move on various surfaces are highly desired for creating such robots as will be able to move in unstructured environments, especially legged robots.

However, the stability, agility, robustness, environmental adaptability, and energy efficiency of modern robots lag far behind that of correspondent animals.

Reporting their work in Chinese Science Bulletin, the researchers said that their research could provide an insight into how geckos coordinate the joint angles on limbs and meet the requirements of moving on various surfaces.

They revealed that the angular observation was performed to describe the difference between the locomotion on horizontal and vertical surfaces.

The team said that data collected from huge video recording and long vapid processing revealed the spatio-temporal rotation trajectory, extrema, ranges of each joint in forelimb and hind limb, the phase diagram of limb angles.

According to the researchers, the results of their experiments provide a direct intuitionistic presentation about the gait of gecko moving on horizontal and vertical surfaces with different speed.

ANI