This often emerges from weekly meetings where faculty, students and postdocs assemble to hear about new work and, as the seminar winds down, throw out silly ideas that often lead to great insight. When the student videotaped real crabs, she found the predictions to be amazingly accurate. These data led to the design of Ariel, the first legged amphibious robot. Many of the principles discovered are now being co-opted by engineers to design robots. Dickinson is working with Berkeley engineer Ron Fearing to design a robotic fly, while Full is collaborating with various robotics labs to create robots that use principles employed by cockroaches, crabs and even geckos.
Nature can now be a good teacher of engineers.
Nature has all kinds of screw-ups. Evolution is based on the principle of just good enough, it's not perfect at all. I think we can build robots today better than any one organism. Copyright 2000, The Regents of the University of California. Produced and maintained by the Office of Public Affairs at UC Berkeley .