Among their subjects are geckos and cockroaches. “Cockroaches continue to surprise us,” says Full, a professor of integrative biology who 15 years ago discovered that when cockroaches run rapidly, they rear up on their two hind legs like bipedal humans. “They have fast relay systems that allow them to dart away quickly in response to light or motion at speeds up to 50 body lengths per second, which is equivalent to a couple hundred miles per hour, if you scale up to the size of humans. This makes them incredibly good at escaping predators.”

Besides their speed to evade predators, cockroaches are also able to flip under ledges and disappear in the blink of an eye, the UC Berkeley researchers report recently in PLoS ONE. The cockroach does this by grabbing the edge with grappling hook-like claws on its back legs and swinging like a pendulum 180 degrees to land firmly underneath, upside down.

This pendulum swing subjects the animal to 3-5 times the force of gravity (3-5 gs), similar to what humans feel at the bottom of a bungee jump, lead author Jean-Michel Mongeau says.

(Video of the feat is available here.)

Surprisingly, the researchers observed geckos using this same escape technique both in the lab and in the rain forest at the Wildlife Reserves near Singapore.

“This behavior is probably pretty widespread, because it is an effective way to quickly move out of sight for small animals,” Full says.

Full and his colleagues make good with these obsessions with animal movements. They use the mechanics found in nature for robotics. Nature has had millions of years to develop the engineering, so why not borrow it?

“This work is a great example of the amazing maneuverability of animals, and how understanding the physical principles used by nature can inspire design of agile robots,” UC Berkeley engineering professor Ron Fearing says.

With the help of Poly-PEDAL Lab’s observations, Fearing’s team created a robot that can turn onto ledges like the roaches and geckos.

This new robot could help in dangerous search and rescue missions, according to Full. “That’s really the challenge now in robotics: to produce robots that can transition on complex surfaces and get into dangerous areas that first responders can’t get into.”

Photo by Jean-Michel Mongeau and Pauline Jennings, courtesy of PolyPEDAL Lab, UC Berkeley

ScienceNOW reports that:

Tails are often an enigma; many creatures have them, but scientists know little about their function, particularly for extinct species. Dinosaur tails are no exception. Researchers have speculated that some species’ tails were used in fighting, whereas others for stability.

Our friend Robert Full and his colleagues at UC Berkeley found how when leaping, red-headed African Agama lizards swing their tails upward to prevent them from pitching head-over-heels into a rock. You can see a video of this feat here.

“We showed for the first time that lizards swing their tail up or down to counteract the rotation of their body, keeping them stable,” says Full. “Inspiration from lizard tails will likely lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots, as well as ones having greater capability to more rapidly detect chemical, biological or nuclear hazards.”

While Full is a biology professor, he is no stranger to robots, Scientific American reports.

These are just the latest developments in Full’s full-on flirtations with robots. He has worked with engineers since the mid-1990s when he helped to develop the crab-inspired Ariel, a minesweeping robot… that can look for buried explosives in surf zones. In 2008 Full co-founded the Center for Integrative Biomechanics in Education & Research (CiBER) at University of California, Berkeley, to further integrate the work of biologists and engineers when designing technology.

“Engineers quickly understood the value of a tail,” UC Berkeley engineering graduate student Thomas Libby explains. “Robots are not nearly as agile as animals, so anything that can make a robot more stable is an advancement, which is why this work is so exciting.”

Full and his team received a surprise benefit from the lizard tail research: understanding how dinosaur tails function.  The new research tested a 40-year-old hypothesis that the two-legged theropod dinosaurs—the ancestors of birds—used their tails as stabilizers while running or dodging obstacles or predators.

Indeed, just like the velociraptor depicted in the movie Jurassic Park, these agile dinosaurs may also have used their tails as stabilizers to prevent forward pitch, Full says. “Muscles willing, the dinosaur could be even more effective with a swing of its tail in controlling body attitude than the lizards.”

The research is published in the recent edition of Nature.

Image: Robert Full lab, UC Berkeley