Meeting Abstract
For humans and large animals, slipping while running can be catastrophic and there are many well documented slippage avoidance strategies. However, while there is no obvious critical survival reason for small animals to avoid slipping, computational models of multi-legged locomotion still assume non-slip conditions in stance. We have found non-slip constraints to severely impede the performance of some of our hexapod robots, and therefore set out to test if these non-slip assumptions apply to the animals that inspired their designs. We investigated slipping in Blaberus discoidalis cockroaches (N=7, 2.66+/-0.8 g (mean,sd)) running at 15-77cm/s (51+/-10 cm/s (mean,sd)). We found that front, mid, and hind legs slipped 21.%, 18.%, 20.% of their total travel distance in the lab frame. We separated video frames into quintiles sorted by turn rate and used Mann-Whitney U tests to compare median turn rate versus slipping distance. We found that median slippage distance was not significantly different in the turning rate bins. Our results suggest that slipping is a routine part of cockroach locomotion, and is independent of turning speeds.
