New device: Tallest height of any known jumper, engineered or biological
A mechanical jumper developed by UC Santa Barbara engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and collaborators is capable of achieving the tallest height — roughly 100 feet (30 meters) — of any jumper to date, engineered or biological. The feat represents a fresh approach to the design of jumping devices and advances the understanding of jumping as a form of locomotion.
“The motivation came from a scientific question,” said Hawkes, who as a roboticist seeks to understand the many possible methods for a machine to be able to navigate its environment. “We wanted to understand what the limits were on engineered jumpers.” While there are centuries’ worth of studies on biological jumpers (that would be us in the animal kingdom), and decades’ worth of research on mostly bio-inspired mechanical jumpers, he said, the two lines of inquiry have been kept somewhat separate.
“There hadn’t really been a study that compares and contrasts the two and how their limits are different — whether engineered jumpers are really limited to the same laws that biological jumpers are,” Hawkes said.
Their research is published in the journal Nature.
Big Spring, Tiny Motor
Biological systems have long served as the first and best models for locomotion, and that has been especially true for jumping, defined by the researchers as a “movement created by forces applied to the ground by the jumper, while maintaining a constant mass.” Many engineered jumpers have focused on duplicating the designs provided by evolution, and to great effect. More