In 2021, on top of the coastal cliffs of Santa Barbara, California, former undergraduate Chris Keeley, at the university nearby, crouched to pull a bundle of rubber and metal out of his backpack.
He spent a few minutes "winding up," a Quantum Magazine report specified that it was a robot. When he was done, he pressed the record button on the camera of his iPhone and watched the robot launch itself high into the air, illustrated a tall arc in the sky, and land neatly close to his feet.
A robot that is being reengineered for exploration of the moon has, in all likelihood, leapt higher than any animal or machine before it on Earth. @yasemin_sap reports: https://t.co/oXcCrhIPzb
— Quanta Magazine (@QuantaMagazine) September 14, 2022
Keeley felt relieved that a lot of test jumps in the past had failed. It was not until later that evening when he returned to his bedroom and downloaded the jump data onto his laptop, that he realized just how well it had worked.
The jumper had reached a record-breaking height of approximately 32.9 meters, as Keeley and his collaborators, led by mechanical engineer researcher Elliot Hawkes from the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported in Nature a few months ago.
Physical Limitations Biological Jumpers are Facing
Not only had the jumper jumped more than thrice higher than other experimental robots built for that task. Instead, it had jumped more than 14 times, higher than any other creature in the animal kingdom.
In all possibilities, their robot jumped higher than anything ever had on this planet. According to assistant professor Ryan St. Pierre, from the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Buffalo, who was not part of the research, he thinks this is one of the very few robots that outperforms biology, and the way that it is outperforming biology is quite clever.
The study findings published in the Nature journal revealed that the robot's success underscores the physical limitations that biological jumpers face in the wild.
Though such limitations are keeping humans from hopping as if they are on "pogo sticks" and stop frogs from falling out of the woods, biology has come up with ingenious workarounds that are pushing up height and length as far as they can go, through small biological tweaks designed for the jumping needs for every animal.
Even the engineers behind the greatest jumper in the world are still in awe of their designs of biology. Now, Keeley said, everywhere he looks, he sees jumping, and he said, "I can't help himself.'
Energy Provided for Movements
Essentially, a jump is a movement act resulting from applying force to the ground minus the loss of any mass, according to the researchers. Therefore, a rocket, which is losing fuel upon launch, or an arrow, leaving its bow does not count.
Muscles are the biological motors that provide the energy for movements. To jump, you crouch down, contracting your calves and other muscles, converting chemical energy available in the muscles to mechanical energy.
Stretchy tissues called tendons connect muscles to the skeleton and transfer mechanical energy to the bone, which uses that energy to push the ground and propel the body upward.
Jumping works in astonishingly akin ways across scales and sizes in the animal kingdom, although some biochemical design quicks enable certain creatures to push the biological restrictions.
The 'Power' of Jump
The power of a jump is equivalent to the amount of energy available to the jumping mechanism per unit during pus-off.
A related study published in Frontiers in Physiology specified that the more energy the muscles produce and the quicker one gets off the ground, the more powerful the jump will be.
However, animals get smaller, their legs are getting shorter, and they are in contact with the ground for shorter periods during launch.
Therefore, they need to be able to emit the energy for a jump with explosive suddenness. For these tinier creatures, nature came up with a creative solution: sorting the majority of the jump energy in highly elastic tissues working as biological springs, professor Greg Sutton and research fellow at the University of Lincoln in England said.
Related information about jumping robots is shown on Nature Video's YouTube video below:
Check out more news and information on Robots in Science Times.
