A new report called “Rapid Inversion: Running Animals and Robots Swing like a Pendulum under Ledges” explains how a study of cockroach and gecko escape tricks is being translated into robotics.

We video recorded cockroaches and geckos rapidly running up an incline toward a ledge, digitized their motion and created a simple model to generalize the behavior. Both species ran rapidly at 12–15 body lengths-per-second toward the ledge without braking, dove off the ledge, attached their feet by claws like a grappling hook, and used a pendulum-like motion that can exceed one meter-per-second to swing around to an inverted position under the ledge, out of sight.

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Quantification of these acrobatic behaviors provides biological inspiration toward the design of small, highly mobile search-and-rescue robots that can assist us during natural and human-made disasters.

My mind doesn’t easily make the leap from bugs trying to escape death to their prediction of robots trying to save lives.

I know researchers wouldn’t want to end their study with visions of small, highly mobile robots that can escape detection but that seems to be the more obvious application.

Insect-sized surveillance drones could be quite dangerous seeing as how they will be virtually undetectable and indistinguishable from real life insects. Along with the fact that their sheer size would make them difficult to shoot down, it’s no surprise that the military is pouring resources into miniaturization.

On the other hand, there’s probably nothing to worry about. Just imagine being told “have no fear, the search-and-rescue cockroachbots can find you…in a disaster.”