By puffing air upwards through a box
of sand, a US laboratory has tested how lizards, crabs and robots cope
with ground that is more or less "fluid".
They say the contraption is like a wind tunnel for studying movement on unstable surfaces.Tests of this kind could help design robots to handle inconsistent terrain - such as might be found on Mars.
For now, the team has identified key aspects of leg shape and movement that help maintain speed on flowing ground.
The results appear in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomechanics.
"The pioneers of flight looked at different wing designs in a wind tunnel, and now we can do this with robotic design," said senior author Daniel Goldman, from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Tread gently
By adjusting the rate at which air is pumped through the sand, Prof Goldman and his team can control precisely how fluid the surface becomes.They used this system to observe the motion of a six-legged "Sandbot", four species-READ MORE - SEE VIDEO -BBC LINK-http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34486870
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