February 18,
2019, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Aimy Wissa,
assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering (MechSE) at Illinois,
leads an interdisciplinary research team to study click beetles to inspire more
agile robots. The team, which includes MechSE Assistant Professor Alison Dunn
and Dr. Marianne Alleyne, a research scientist in the Department of Entomology,
recently presented their ongoing and novel work on the quick release mechanism
of click beetles at the 2019 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
(SICB) Annual Meeting.
Ophelia
Bolmin, a graduate student in
Wissa's Bio-inspired Adaptive Morphology (BAM) Lab, presented novel synchrotron
X-ray footage that showed the internal latch mechanism of the click beetle, and
demonstrated for the first time to the scientific
community how the hinge morphology and mechanics enable
this unique clicking mechanism. The presentation, "The click beetle latch
mechanism: An in-vivo study using synchrotron X-rays," was part of an
invited symposium on mechanisms of energy flow in organismal movement.
This work
builds on research that was initiated by the Illinois team nearly two years
ago, detailing the click beetles' legless self-righting jumping mechanism. The
team already built prototypes of a hinge-like spring-loaded device that are
being incorporated into a robot.
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