Scientists from the University of Manchester spent a lot of time in the lab. They taught spiders to jump and recorded by high speed camera in order to study in detail the behaviour of the spider during a jump. The aim of scientists is the creation of Bouncing robots. Why this goal was selected because of the spiders? No other creature does not jump like a spider.
Many insects and arthropods are able to jump very long distances, if you compare distance with their own size. People usually cannot jump a distance greater than 1.5 the length of his body. But among all the spiders highlights another feature. If insects often jump in order to escape, the spiders jump in order to attack their prey. This makes the jumping spiders more coordinated. Spiders assess the environment in order to make the leap.
For their work, scientists went to the pet store where he purchased four Royal jumping spiders. This is one of the more than 6,000 species of jumping spiders, which belongs to the family Salticidae arthropods. For spiders they built the platform with platforms and high-speed cameras. Then the researchers embarked on the most difficult – they had to teach the spiders to jump.
Selected jumping spiders were missing one production per week in order to feel full. For this reason, the bait was hard to get the spiders to jump. Scientists just moved the spiders from one platform to another in order to show that spiders have to do. As it turned out, was only trained spider Kim. Three other spiders just refused to jump.
For a week the spider Kim did 15 jumps of different length and height. She jumped down from the platform, jumped on it, moved to the platform at the same height. It was allocated a certain amount of web. Scientists believe that this happens for security reasons in case as a result of the jump was not achieved. But the interesting thing is that for different types of jumps were involved in different paws. The movement of these legs and is the most valuable result of the study.
Scientists believe that the robots, which will be endowed with spider-like skills, will be able to jump high enough. If they are able to study in detail the behaviour of the spider during a jump, the robots will be able to jump to the skies.
Scientists have taught a spider to jump, and then to teach the robot
Ernest Vasilevskiy