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A Robot that Can Act Like a Squirrel

No robot can emulate a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps, and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches. Until now. Watch this video to see how a University of California, Berkeley, team is trying to remedy that situation.

“The robots we have now are OK, but how do you take it to the next level? How do you get robots to navigate a challenging environment in a disaster where you have pipes and beams and wires? Squirrels could do that, no problem. Robots can’t do that,” said Robert Full  , one of paper’s senior authors and a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley.

Topics:
Automation Robotics

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 - [Narrator] You know how squirrels can just leap from branch to branch? They make it look so easy, but it's not. There are a lot of forces at play, and if you want a leaping robot to stick the landing just like a squirrel, well, first you have to understand what the squirrel is doing so expertly. This is the Salto robot, a foot-tall jumping dynamo developed at UC Berkeley a decade ago.

    00:00:29 In two new papers, UC Berkeley researchers outline how they studied the acrobatics of the squirrel and trained Salto to land like the rodents. It turns out that squirrels apply a braking force when they land. 86% of the kinetic energy from a jump is absorbed by their front legs, but Salto only has one leg, which is an advantage for its jumping ability, but not so helpful for landing on a narrow branch.

    00:00:59 To help it stay upright, Salto has a flywheel that whirls a bit like a human's arms or a squirrel's bendy torso when balancing. So the researchers took what they found out from branch-braking by squirrels, which also used their legs to prevent over or undershooting, and engineered it into the bot. Watch closely and you can see that the flywheel goes into reverse when Salto lands and the tension in the legs changes,

    00:01:27 effectively braking like the squirrel does. Someday, robots with Salto's squirrel-like abilities might be useful for navigating disaster areas, infrastructure inspection, or managing forests, or to explore low gravity bodies in space, like Enceladus, a moon of Saturn where gravity is only one 80th of earth's and a single jump from Salto would cover a football field. Think of it as one small step for a robot and a giant leap for squirrel-kind.