In a paper appearing this week in the journal Science, this interdisciplinary team reports on its most recent experiments, quantifying how free-ranging squirrels learn to leap from different types of launching pads - some bendy, some not - in just a few attempts, how they change their body orientation in midair based on the quality of their launch, and how they alter their landing maneuvers in real-time, depending on the stability of the final perch. Jacobs and her students have developed precise methods to study cognition in wild campus squirrels, and they proposed integrating these studies with biomechanics, extending Full’s laboratory models not only to mammals for the first time, but to a wild mammal - squirrels - that had experienced the full natural development of its agility. To tackle these questions, Full and former doctoral student Nathaniel Hunt, now an assistant professor of biomechanics at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, joined forces with professor of psychology Lucia Jacobs and former UC Berkeley doctoral student Judy Jinn. Nate Hunt, Judy Jinn, Lucia Jacobs and Aaron Teixeira with a fox squirrel on the apparatus they used during their leaping experiments on the UC Berkeley campus. Fortunately, now we can understand how to embody control and explain innovation by creating physical models, like the most agile smart robots ever built.” “That’s an important fundamental biology question. “I see this as the next frontier: How are the decisions of movement shaped by our body? This is made far more challenging, because you also must assess your environment,” said Full, a professor of integrative biology. But now they are tackling a harder problem: How do animals decide whether or not to take a leap? How do they assess their biomechanical abilities to know whether they can stick the landing? The payoff to understanding how squirrels learn the limits of their agility could be robots with better control to nimbly move through varied landscapes, such as the rubble of a collapsed building in search of survivors or to quickly access an environmental threat.īiologists like Robert Full at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown over the last few decades how animals like geckos, cockroaches and squirrels physically move and how their bodies and limbs help them in sticky situations - all of which have been applied to making more agile robots. ![]() No, these videos are part of a research study to understand the split-second decisions squirrels make routinely as they race through the tree canopy, jumping from branch to branch, using skills honed to elude deadly predators. ![]() Just more YouTube content documenting the crazy antics of squirrels hell-bent on reaching peanuts? Videos of squirrels leaping from bendy branches across impossibly large gaps, parkouring off walls, scrambling to recover from tricky landings. (UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Jeremy Snowden footage courtesy of Robert Full) UC Berkeley researchers studied the leaps and landings of squirrels to understand how they make decisions of when and when not to jump, but the findings also provide ideas for engineers who are building robots to match the agility of squirrels. High-speed video of squirrels executing amazing leaps in pursuit of peanuts captures the animals’ innovative solutions to reaching their goal.
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