《The secrets of nature’s grossest creatures, channeled Into robots》Part2/3

Source：

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_the_secrets_of_nature_s_grossest_creatures_channeled_into_robots?language=en

Robust systems are also fault tolerant and fail-safe. This is the foot of a cockroach. It has spines, gluey pads and claws, but if you take off those feet, they can still go over rough terrain, without hardly slowing down. They can run up mesh without their feet. Here's an animal using a normal, alternating tripod: three legs, but in nature, the insects often have lost their legs. Here's one moving with two middle legs gone. It can even lose three legs, in a tripod, and adopt a new gait, a hopping gait.

Robust systems are also damage resistant. Here's an animal climbing up a wall. It looks like a rapid, smooth, vertical climb, but when you slow it down, you see something very different. Here's what they do. They intentionally have a head-on collision with the wall so they don't slow down and can transition up it in 75 milliseconds. And they can do this in part because they have extraordinary exoskeletons. And they're really just made up of compliant joints that are tubes and plates connected to one another. Here's a dissection of an abdomen of a cockroach. You see these plates, and you see the compliant membrane.