How lizards can help build a better bot (video)
SmartPlanet visits Robert Full's UC Berkeley lab to check out how a red-headed Agama lizard inspired a robot dubbed Tailbot.
Where do you find inspiration for your work? Robert Full, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, and his team looked to lizards when it came to thinking of ways to better design robots for search and rescue missions.
Such robots have to be more agile. So Full's team studied the movements of a red-headed Agama lizard and discovered the importance of having a tail.
"I think what this shows is that even the strangest creature that we think has nothing to offer really holds fundamental secrets of how things work, and those can be translated to incredible discoveries," Full said.
SmartPlanet recently visited his lab to look at Tailbot and the lizard that inspired it.
This video originally appeared on SmartPlanet with the headline "Lizard motion influencing design of search and rescue robots."
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