UC Berkeley biologist Robert Full shares his fascination with spiny cockroach legs that allow them to scuttle at full speed across loose mesh and gecko feet that have billions of nano-bristles to run straight up walls. His talk, complete with wonderful slow-mo video of cockroach, crab and gecko gaits, explains his goal of creating the perfect robotic "distributed foot."
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tags: TEDTalks, biomimetics, biomutualism, biology, engineering, origin of flight, Robert Full, streaming video
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Ah, Bob Full, the Big Man of functional morphology.
This is a great talk.