Scientists have taught the spider to jump, then to teach robots

Scientists at Manchester University spent a lot of time in the laboratory. They taught the spiders to jump and recorded on high-speed cameras in order to study the behavior of the spider in detail during the jump. The goal of scientists is to create jumping robots. Why were spiders chosen for this purpose? No other creature jumps like a spider.

Many insects and arthropods are able to jump very long distances if you compare the distance with their own size. A person, as a rule, can not jump more than 1.5 times the length of his body. But among all the spiders there is one more feature. If the insects most often jump in order to escape, the spiders jump to attack their prey. This makes jumping spiders more coordinated. Spiders estimate the environment in order to make a jump.

For their work, scientists went to a pet store, where they purchased four royal jumping spiders. This is one of more than 6000 species of bouncing spiders, which belongs to the family of arthropods Salticidae. For spiders, they built a platform with platforms and high-speed cameras. After that, scientists began the most difficult - they had to teach the spiders to jump.

The selected jumping spiders were short of one prey per week in order to feel full. For this reason, it was difficult to get the spiders to jump. Scientists simply moved the spiders from one platform to another in order to show what exactly the spiders have to do. As it turned out, the trainee was only spider Kim. Three other spiders simply refused to jump.

For a week spider Kim made 15 jumps, different in length and height. She jumped off the platform, jumped on it, moved to the platform at the same height. At the same time, some amount of cobwebs were allocated. Scientists believe that this is for safety reasons in case the goal is not achieved as a result of the jump. But the most interesting thing is that different paws were used for different types of jumps. The movement of these paws is the most valuable result of the study.

Scientists believe that it is those robots that will be endowed with spider skills that will be able to jump high enough. If they can study the behavior of the spider in detail during the jump, the robots will be able to jump to the skies.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/research-development/uchenye-nauchili-pauka-prygat-chtoby-zatem-nauchit-robotov.html.