Leaping and falling generally lead to landing, which can be difficult to do. This study considers the problem as it involves cats and legged space robots: “Analysis of Cushioned Landing Strategies of Cats Based on Posture Estimation,” Li Zhang, Liangliang Han, Haohang Liu, Rui Shi, Meiyang Zhang, Weijun Wang, Xuyan Hou, Biomimetic, vol. 13, no. […]
If some dinosaurs had wings and flapped them would that frighten insects into fleeing? This study tried to tease out a likely answer, by making and using a dino-like robot. The video shows some of what happened. The study is: “Escape behaviors in prey and the evolution of pennaceous plumage in dinosaurs,” Jinseok Park, Minyoung […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Suspicious eyes — In the year 2001, US president George W. Bush foreshadowed a hope that decades later would pervade the robotics industry. Bush stood next to Russian president Vladimir Putin at a press conference in Slovenia […]
An old song may have a new answer. The song is Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The answer, maybe, is suggested by the new study: “Dandelion-Picking Legged Robot,” Sandilya Sai Garimella and Shai Revzen, arXiv:2112.05383, 2021. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of […]
