High Speed Rollers

Engineers Learning from Caterpillars

a short one for a bonus today…from creation.com

Larva of Pleuroptya ruralis, the mother-of-pearl moth, can quickly transform itself into a wheel when it encounters potential danger. It can roll for up to five complete revolutions, traveling at about 40 cm (15 inches) per second—about 40 times faster than its ordinary speed of locomotion. The caterpillar can go from flat-and-stationary to rolling in just 60 milliseconds (six-hundredths of a second).

The caterpillar has caught the eye of engineers envious of its capacity to morph itself to wheeled or non-wheeled locomotion as the situation demands. “Inspired by this behavior”, the engineers have attempted to copy its transformer capabilities in the soft-bodied robot dubbed GoQBot. (The research was funded by a military program to design flexible robots that can gain access to tight spaces.) read more

for more depth, see previous post on how engineers look to God’s designs in nature for inspiration