Six-Legged Robot One-Ups Nature With Faster Gait

Usually, biologically inspired robotics is about figuring out evolution's clever tricks and then trying to apply them to your robot to make it faster or more efficient or more skilled or whatever. It isn't very often that a robot ends up beating nature at its own game--evolution is a very intelligent designer, and roboticists are going up against a half billion years of trial and error. In an article published last week in Nature Communications, researchers from EPFL, in Lausanne, Switzerland, managed to show that for legged hexapods, a bipedal gait (using just two active legs at once) is often the fastest and most efficient way of moving, even though insects use a tripedal gait instead. Generally, the most efficient way of moving (especially moving quickly) for legged animals is to minimize the amount of time that you've got legs making contact with the ground. You see this all the time in mammals, the fastest of which prioritize flight phases, where motion is more like a sequence of dynamic jumps as opposed to just a sped-up walk.