Bio-inspired robotics and robotics-inspired biology

Animals move in many different ways, jump, fly, run, walk, crawl, swim, climb... Despite so many different forms of locomotion, all organisms face the same challenge: Their life and death often depend on the ability to perform well at some biological tasks, like running away from a predator. Yet, speed might not be the only important trait – other traits like stability or efficiency might be important too (there is no point in being super-fast if you trip over every second step). But the trouble is that traits like speed and stability are often at odds to one another, maximising one cause the other to decrease – something we call a performance trade-off. So how might we study these? Unfortunately, nature forms a biased sample, because only successful species survived, but to get closer to an answer to this question, it is equally important to look at less successful strategies. Using bio-inspired robots, which mimic the locomotion and shape of the animal model, we can modulate different parameters independent of each other, to see how these affect the overall locomotory performance. What we learn from this, we can compare back to the animals, but also use it to develop bio-inspired gaits for industrial robots.

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Meeting-ID: 989 6099 9390
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