Cockroach, Gecko and Robot, as Escape Artists

choi

Damon Poeter, Cockroach-Like Robot Scurries Over Ledges in Creepy Fashion. PC Magazine, June 8, 2012.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405548,00.asp

My comment:
(a) Robert Full, a biologist professor has studied cockroach for more than a decade. Recently he found that when a cockroach running for its life found a gap, it flipped underside rather than jumped over. The professor then found gecko doing the same. In collaboration with a fellow robotics professor Ron Fearing at UC Berkeley, a robot called DASH, short for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, was modified to do the same trick--by "using cleverly placed Velcro strips [on DASH] to replicate those animals' natural grappling abilities."

The Velcro strips are imperative, as demonstrated by a cockroach whose claws had been ablated.

(b) With the above summary, watch the video ONLY.

* ablation (n): "the process of ablating: as a : surgical removal

(c) The report is based on
Mongeau J-M et al, Rapid Inversion: Running Animals and Robots Swing like a Pendulum under Ledges. PLoS ONE 7(6): e38003, June 6, 2012.
http://www.plosone.org/article/i ... ournal.pone.0038003

(i) There is no need to read this.
9ii) The video in PC magazine is actually composed of the six short video clips (attached near the bottom) in this scientific report.